Life & Wisdom Quote by Kenneth Koch

A small confession that doubles as a manifesto, Koch's line shrugs off the macho fantasy of the solitary genius. "Likes" is the tell: influence isn't a threat to authenticity but a pleasure, a chosen mode of living in culture. Coming from a New York School poet, that casualness is strategic. These were writers who treated art less like scripture and more like conversation: painting, jazz, movies, friends, city noise, French surrealists, a witty line overheard at a party. To announce an appetite for influence is to announce allegiance to that social, porous model of creativity.

The subtext also needles a particular American anxiety: the panic that taking in too much makes you derivative, unoriginal, secondhand. Koch flips it. Influence becomes a sign of confidence and athletic curiosity, the writer as magpie and fan. It's a way of admitting debts without turning them into guilt, and it quietly rebukes the workshop-era pressure to "find your voice" as if it were a pure substance hidden under everything you've read.

There's a political edge, too, in its modesty. Mid-century literary culture could be obsessed with seriousness, with originality as moral proof. Koch, often playful and formally adventurous, implies that art grows by contamination. You're not protecting a fragile inner self; you're building a self out of encounters. The line works because it makes a virtue out of what everyone does anyway, then dares you to do it openly, joyfully, and with taste.