Randall Jarrell Quotes

I can't draw a line between myself and stuff that I do. It's funny, I don't want to sound like it's just about this, but really with everything I do, it's hard for me to take myself out of it.

Manet did not do the expected. He was a pioneer. He followed his individual whim. Told the public what he wanted it to know, not the time worn things the public already knew and thought it wanted to hear again. The public was very much offended.

Our thoughts are to the individual as our art is to the community.

In our language rhyme is a barrel. A barrel of dynamite. The line is a fuse. The line smoulders to the end and explodes; and the town is blown sky-high in a stanza.

I'm not a guy who likes cliches. I don't think that stereotypes and cliches are the end of the line, when it comes to a performance.

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language.

My lines all curve. I tend to connect the wrong dots.

Clothes and jewellery should be startling, individual.

Poetry is probably the one field of writing in which it is a mistake to try to psych out editors. In fact, specific marketing advice can sometimes harm the novice poet by enticing him to pursue fashions. The poet's best hope is to sound like nobody else, The finest, most enduring poetry constructs a marketplace of its own.

Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities-minds unlike any others-and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.

We are not just Art for Michelangelo to carve, he can't rewrite the agro of my furied heart- Lady Gaga 10/22/10

There is no comparison between him and me; he developed a whole new way of making art and he's clearly in a league of his own. It would be like making comparisons with Warhol.

Everyone has their own sound, and if you're heard enough, folks will come to recognize it. Style however, is a different thing. Try to express your own ideas. It's much more difficult to do, but the rewards are there if you're good enough to pull it off.

I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.

I'd like to walk that fine line between the authentic artist self and the manufactured artist self. I'd like to exist outside of a set of expectations or assumptions about what the Kehinde Wiley brand is. And I'd like to walk towards something that's a bit more unpredictable, human.

I think everyone is born creative but it can be suppressed by fear.

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought , for one would thereby dispense with man himself.

Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever.

I don't know that you can compare it to another show because each show has its own individuality.

My life is not a political campaign. I just write about what is on my mind. I just play whatever I feel like playing. Whatever is in my soul at the time is what I want to do. I have, thank god, enough people who are still interested in what I am doing so that I can go out and keep doing it.

The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.