Daily Inspiration Quote by James Dickey

Precision and recklessness sound like opposites until Dickey yokes them together and dares you to admit you want both. The line borrows Shakespearean grandeur ("the consummation devoutly to be wished") and smuggles it into a credo for creative risk: not sloppy abandon, not bloodless control, but a disciplined leap. It’s a writer’s fantasy of mastery that still courts disaster.

Dickey’s intent feels pointedly aesthetic. “To be precise” signals craft, the hard-earned calibration of language and perception. “And reckless” is the refusal to let that calibration become caution, tastefulness, or careerism. The phrase “to be” turns the sentence into an identity claim rather than a technique; he’s not talking about an occasional move, but a way of operating in the world. The semicolon functions like a hinge: you don’t choose one virtue over the other; you splice them.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to safe seriousness. Dickey came up in a mid-century literary culture that often rewarded polish and restraint, even as it mythologized rawness. His line punctures that false choice. Recklessness without precision is just mess; precision without recklessness is just etiquette. He’s arguing for the rare state where your control is so fluent you can afford to break things on purpose.

Contextually, it fits Dickey’s broader fixation on extremity and intensity, the sense that art should feel like a high-stakes act, not a well-managed product. The Shakespeare echo isn’t decorative; it crowns the desire with mock-solemnity, admitting how almost embarrassingly devout that desire is among writers: to be exact, and still dangerous.