A Quote by Kenneth Koch

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation. — © Kenneth Koch
Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
Had the car companies continued to do generation two, generation three, generation four of the EV-1, we'd be looking at a spectacular car today.
When I was home, traditionally since I was young, I'd write in cafés. That was the romantic notion in 1963. Café atmospheres back then were different. The café life really stemmed from the Parisians' idea of it, with poets struggling over their poems and drinking coffee. No music, no sounds, maybe a little jazz, or soul, but mostly nothing. Now you go into a café and the music is really loud, people are having business meetings, they are on their cellphones. It changes from generation to generation.
Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.
If you can find two poems in a book, it could be a pretty good book for you. You know, two poems you really like. There are some poets who are fairly big names in contemporary poetry and who write a book and I might like three or four poems in the book, but the rest of them don't appeal to me personally; but I think that's the way it really ought to be. I think it's really a rare thing to like everything that somebody has written.
I've got my wife. I've got my four kids. I've got parents, grandparents still, and three really good friends. It's all you need. I'd rather have three really good friends than 20 good friends.
This is what happens: somebody—girl usually—got a free spirit, doesn't get on too good with her parents. These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float away. And maybe you never see the balloon again . . . Or maybe three or four years from now, or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home . . . But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time.
I think millennials are a generation that's a little bit behind, maybe four or five years behind the previous generation, as far as when they buy a house.
If you look at the first generation of wireless, it really lasted about 15 years before we went to the second generation. When we implemented the fourth generation, which allowed us to do all the smartphones and the videos, the time between that and going to the fifth generation is going to be four years.
Well, when I came to Hollywood, there were three names really of Latin actors, three or four names, maybe five. There was Raul Julia, Edward James Olmos, Andy Garcia, Antonio Banderas, Jimmy Smits. Now there's a lot.
I've gone periods of maybe four months without writing anything, but it's not a problem. It just means something's building inside you, and it'll build and it'll build, and at some point it'll come out, and it does, and it usually comes out in three or four songs, and you play it that way, really.
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
I really respect the new generation, people who are maybe 12 or 13. I think it's really important to understand the future customer - their tastes and their dreams. What my generation is dreaming of is different from what my parents dreamt.
Each generation tries to disassociate itself with the last generation. And then, about three decades later, people kind of start to maybe appreciate what you might have done a while back that you don't even realize you did.
I don't really get to attend church. That's definitely one of the challenges. I'm always playing on Sunday, and that's tough because I really never get to take the sacrament - maybe once every three or four months when I'm home and have a week off.
When I was three or four, I was really good at drawing and painting, and everyone used to say, "You're going to go to art college." I didn't really know what that meant.
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