Randall Jarrell Quotes

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

Life's not black-and-white. Sometimes the ends justifies the means.

I love Michael Bay movies. I don't think I'd be selling out if I did one. I happen to like his movies. I think selling out is doing something you don't believe in, and you're doing it for a selfish purpose.

If any artist abuses his audience as a means to any end, noble or ignoble, he better have a damn good reason for it.

For the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considerd with his devotion to his art.

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?

... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.

Everyone makes moral choices that better themselves and hurt someone else along the way - and whether or not the means justify the ends. And that, to me, is universal.

Revolting means for good ends make the ends of themselves revolting.

Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.

The professional guts a book through - in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve.

I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter.

All I can do is say I smell a rat. I don't know where it is or what kind of rat it is, but as an artist, I can express how. But I couldn't responsibly stand up and tell people which way to go, because then I'm just as guilty as the people who are telling everybody else what to do and where to go.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist. I don't mean there's never any overlap. You learn things in one area and bring them into another area. But giving a speech against racism is not the same as writing a novel. The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

There are many who have grave scruples about deceiving but think it as nothing to deceive themselves.

Whether the charmer sinner it, or saint it, If folly grow romantic, I must paint it.

It is a mean thief or a successful author that plunders the dead.

People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it

Moral: It all depends.

The greatness of action includes immoral as well as moral greatness--Cortes and Napoleon, as well as Luther and Washington.

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.