James Dickey

“William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.”

“The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.”

“Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.”

“To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.”

“I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.”

“She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.”