K.M. Randall Quotes

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.

whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.

Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By.

I have always wanted to midcourse-correct (or undermine) in a poem, and let that be the turn. That poem is to do with displacement, with almosts - even the rhymes are intentionally off.

We are saved by grace, not by the works of the law. But don't be so quick to write the law off.

I soared above the song birds And never heard them sing I lived my life in winter And then you brought the spring

Living the 'easy' life today seems to make a 'difficult' life tomorrow.

Deep inside, the majority of people had the sneaking suspicion that evil was more powerful than good and could be counteracted only by more evil.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

Sometimes when almost everything is wrong, one thing is so right you would do it all again.

If someone says, 'No, no, no, the earth is round!', they think this person is an extremist. That's what it's like for someone with my right-of-centre views working inside the BBC.

Secrets of the cosmos will begin to unravel. I, for one, can't wait.

I'm not creating the universe. I'm creating a model of the universe, which may or may not be true.

I considered going into business or becoming a lawyer - not for the money, but for the thrill of problem-solving.

Both religions and musicals work best with energetic and committed believers. Cynicism or detachment would have destroyed the magic - something true of religion, too.

You can be only a modest distance away from the gravity brane, and gravity will be incredibly weak.

I had this illusion that if I kind of dressed badly that I wouldn't stand out. You know, so I actually went out of my way to not look different to the extent I could.

All I want to do is hit someone in the mouth. It's a whole lot easier than working for a living. Don't make anything noble out of what I do

The chaotic theory of education is that you go to college, earn a degree and then that degree may be used in something completely different. It's about achieving the goal first.

We can not understand the visible problem until we go to the invisible one.

There is the finest line between data and evidence.

Do not fear lack of knowledge, talent or skill. Seek motivation and the others will come.

If you simply cannot make the right decision, make a decision and then make it right.

Your integrity is more precious than your life.

You cannot win a game of tug-o-war by merely standing firm.

Without a goal, you cannot survive.

Management: First fix the blame. Then fix the problem.

Loneliness cannot be shared.

Adams first law of survival: Get even first.

Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

We are all so to speak intellectuals about something.

When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.

A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.

Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.

The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.

A person is a process, one that leads to death.

Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything I am being sympathetic, not satiric for the very best reasons.

Doesn't the world need the painter's praise anymore?

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that "the way it really was" half the time is, and half the time isn't, the way it ought to be in the novel.

We died like aunts of pets or foreigners.

Habits are happiness of a sort...

A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.

Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.

Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day.

Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.

One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.