Top 14 Kenneth Koch Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Kenneth Koch Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not natio

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother’s side of the family in general were interested in literature.
Kenneth Koch
I’ve had trouble with criticism, I guess. It’s hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.
Kenneth Koch
Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one’s own connoisseur.
Kenneth Koch
It’s enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.
Kenneth Koch
I’m a writer who likes to be influenced.
Kenneth Koch
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.
Kenneth Koch
I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it’s not.
Kenneth Koch
As for political poetry, as it’s usually defined, it seems there’s very little good political poetry.
Kenneth Koch
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!
Kenneth Koch
Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things.
Kenneth Koch
The subject matter of the stories on the surface… there seem to be a number of stories about travel.
Kenneth Koch
It’s a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.
Kenneth Koch
I certainly have the feeling that I’m the same person even though I’ve changed a great deal.
Kenneth Koch
I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.
Kenneth Koch