Kenneth Koch Quotes & Sayings

“Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.”

“It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.”

“As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.”

“When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!”

“Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.”

“As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.”

“I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.”

“Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.”

“I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal.”

“I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.”