Randall Jarrell Quotes

My art is not limited to the songs I create but also to the reaction it creates. I like to sit back and look at the whole thing as if it's a tornado that I'm controlling. It's creating chaos. When you create chaos, ideas are turned upside down, and everybody looks at things in a different way.

I'm trying to trick people into thinking about the unthinkable by using pop culture images.

That's the job of art: to undo the logic of the world.

Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?

The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a tight straightjacket.

I can do something with almost anything I see. Everything is still interesting to me.

The fellow is either a madman or a poet.

You don't talk about paintings, you look at them.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I just love to act. It's my favorite thing to do in the world, and what keeps it interesting, to me, is the creative challenge. So, different kinds of characters, that's what I just love to do.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

I've always thought that problem-solving is highly overrated and that problem creation is far more interesting.

A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.

If you follow the process of a thought - any thought, not just about art - the thought changes. It has to do with what you can hold in your memory and what you lose. That's an interesting thing to try to paint.

Anything can be misinterpreted. People can look at Christ on a cross and think, This is an image of murder, this is violent, this has sexual imagery in it. And it just - I think it's my job as an artist to be out there pushing people's buttons and making them question everything.

the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.

One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.

The world is forever babbling of originality; but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world; the first man himself--who according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an original; the only original author being God.

It's a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a poet.

...he who has seen the intimate beauty of nature cannot tear himself away from it again. He must become either a poet or a naturalist and, if his eyes are keen and his powers of observation sharp enough, he may well become both.

Save interesting thoughts, quotations, films, technologies... the medium doesn't matter, so long as it inspires you.

I just close my eyes and act like I'm a 3-year-old. I try to get as close to a childlike level as possible because we were all artists back then. So you just close your eyes and think back to when you were as young as you can remember and had the least barriers to your creativity.

True originality has its foundations in the soul, not in the mind, and when there is an effort to create something different it is usually a failure. Beethoven or Schumann or Chopin did not try to be original. They were original.

Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.

The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed