John Crowe Ransom Quotes

The worst misfortune that can happen to an ordinary man is to have an extraordinary father.

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.

If I didn't do something perfectly, I had to do it again... I grew up with a glue gun pointed at my head.

I've always got such high expectations for myself. I'm aware of them, but I can't relax them.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

You win an Oscar, and the movie that comes after that is always going to be compared.

I've always been too hard on myself to behave like I've arrived or even to enjoy whatever success I've had. I've always envisioned myself higher than where I was and I still do. With each success I think, 'That's nice but I'm supposed to go there!'

The reality of the writer's world is that you set yourself up for future disappointment with every success that you deliver because you end up raising your audience's expectations.

Oh, I am 1,000 percent too hard on myself.

My parents never really pushed me, but I was so hard on myself. I would say I had some perfectionist quality, to a fault.

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.

All the good pictures that came so easily now make the next set of pictures virtually impossible in your mind.

He was such a bad writer, they revoked his poetic license.

if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and trameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!

The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.

Why did I keep hitching myself to dreams as big as that Montana sky? I was like Rooster Jim's chickens, with no way to fly that high.

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.

There's nothing harder than making a mellow, clean record. It's really scary. I can see why people would never want to do it.

There's huge amounts of nonsense that goes with everything surrounding music and art. All the things you have to do promote yourself - there's huge amounts of nonsense.

If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue.

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.

Writing must certainly be one of the hardest professions - writing and painting.