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

The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel. - 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

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

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur. - Kenneth Koch

Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost. - Kenneth Koch

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation. - Kenneth Koch

It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work. - Kenneth Koch

It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling. - Kenneth Koch

It takes a long time to publish a book. - Kenneth Koch

It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in. - Kenneth Koch

I have 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

I am a writer who likes to be influenced. - Kenneth Koch

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry. - 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