In no particular order of preference...
We treat the fatal consequences of technology as though they were a technical defect that could be remedied by technology alone. We are looking for an objective way out of the crisis of objectivity.
Vaclav Havel, 1992
Readers often imagine that you're writing autobiography, but if you've spent twenty years or more trying to be the best damn liar you can be it's quite likely you couldn't write real autobiography if you tried.
printed in Hellnotes (horror writers trade mag), 10-13-2000
"I dream," Daisy continued, "that by tomorrow at three in the afternoon, American Express, Visa and Mastercard's stocks will have tumbled so low, they will fall off the charts. Then the entire board of directors of each company will be forced to resign with a large majority taking the easy way out via cyanide pills. The Dow Jones will close early so all the brokers can rush home and smoke crack while the banks repossess their BMWs and their health club memberships and foreclose on their condominiums which used to be your rent-controlled apartments. By Wednesday, noon, the military-industrial complex will be reduced to rubble. There will be homes for the homeless, food for the hungry, care for the ill, permission for the imagination and no weapons. Then I'll go home, light a joint, open a beer and make love for the rest of my life. How does that sound to you?"
Sarah Schulman, People In Trouble (1990)
Indeed, if the mumbled truth be known, I have so many little aches and pains and stiffnesses and headaches and small bladder and partially detached retina and what-have-you that the day age finally strikes me down with something serious, I won't be too surprised. Yet every time I go to the doctor's, I'm pronounced in perfect health. I think perfect health is matter of having the right psychology to ignore all the pains most of us live with day in and day out. I don't think it's being without those pains, though.
Sam Delany, from 1984, in a letter to Robert Bravard
While Britain is undoubtedly one of the more tolerant societies, something has to explain why black men still can't drive anything more salubrious than a three-wheeled pizza van without being harassed by the police. Or why, recently, a house-hunting white couple knocked on my door, rather too pointedly enquiring about the "mix" of the street, and whether some of the neighbours were prone to playing "loud music". "Only me," I said sweetly, and shut the door with a bang. Don't get me wrong. It's not that I'm prejudiced against stupid white people -- I just wouldn't want to live next door to one.
Barbara Ellen, Guardian (UK), 2000-12-17
Youth, after all, is not a permanent condition, and a clash of generations is not so fundamentally dangerous to the art of government as would be a clash between rulers and ruled.
from Generation X, by Chris Hamblett and Jane Davidson (1960s novel band was named after)
[2.2.1] Now before Psammetichus became king of Egypt, the Egyptians believed that they were the oldest people on earth. But ever since Psammetichus became king and wished to find out which people were the oldest, they have believed that the Phrygians were older than they, and they than everybody else.
[2.2.2] Psammetichus, when he was in no way able to learn by inquiry which people had first come into being, devised a plan by which he took two newborn children of the common people and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flocks. He gave instructions that no one was to speak a word in their hearing; they were to stay by themselves in a lonely hut, and in due time the shepherd was to bring goats and give the children their milk and do everything else necessary.
[2.2.3] Psammetichus did this, and gave these instructions, because he wanted to hear what speech would first come from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling. And he had his wish; for one day, when the shepherd had done as he was told for two years, both children ran to him stretching out their hands and calling "Bekos!" as he opened the door and entered.
[2.2.4] When he first heard this, he kept quiet about it; but when, coming often and paying careful attention, he kept hearing this same word, he told his master at last and brought the children into the king's presence as required. Psammetichus then heard them himself, and asked to what language the word "Bekos" belonged; he found it to be a Phrygian word, signifying bread.
[2.2.5] Reasoning from this, the Egyptians acknowledged that the Phrygians were older than they. This is the story which I heard from the priests of Hephaestus' temple at Memphis; the Greeks say among many foolish things that Psammetichus had the children reared by women whose tongues he had cut out.
Herodotus
Overtly or implicitly, most of the essays reprinted here carry on this quarrel with the left. The first section of the book is, among other things, an extended polemic against standard leftist notions about advanced capitalism - that the consumer economy makes us slaves to commodities, that the function of the mass media is to manipulate our fantasies so we will equate fulfillment with buying the system's products. These ideas are at most half true. Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it. By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products; it had a way of spilling over into rebellion against the constricting conditions of our lives. The history of the sixties strongly suggests that the impulse to buy a new car and tool down the freeway with the radio blasting rock-and-roll is not unconnected to the impulse to fuck outside marriage, get high, stand up to men or white people or bosses, join dissident movements. In fact, the mass media helped to spread rebellion, and the system obligingly marketed products that encouraged it, for the simple reason that there was money to be made from rebels who were also consumers. On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.
Ellen Willis
The voice of a didgeridoo is a call from far away, centuries old. If you pressed your ear to the earth, it's the sound the earth would make. Some of the notes are like an enormous animal panting at the end of its life. I opened my eyes and smiled at my two friends, who looked ripe and yielding and soft, like things that were rising and ready to bake. The three of us shook our heads in wonder at the man and the music he was making. It sounded like an ancient God, or the way desert winds must have sounded to the first ears on earth. If it were a color, it would be rich and planty purple, like eggplant, earthy with light behind it.
"Didgeridoo", Anne Lamott, Salon, 3/4/99
Noir is horror's alcoholic cousin that smokes too much.
Brian Hodge, interviewed by Thomas Roche on gothic.net, May 2000
The devil was once crossing the Libyan desert, and he came upon a spot where a number of small fiends were tormenting a holy hermit. The sainted man easily shook off their evil suggestions. The devil watched their failure and then he stepped forward to give them a lesson. "What you do is too crude... Permit me for one moment." With that he whispered to the holy man, "Your brother has just been made Bishop of Alexandria." A scowl of malignant jealousy at once clouded the serene face of the hermit. "That," said the devil to his imps, "is the sort of thing which I should recommend."
Oscar Wilde, at a dinner party
The next day I drove up into the north. I knew that the road was the one on which a Contra mine had exploded, killing "the thirty-two". I felt extremely fearless as we went over the bumps. "How do you protect the roads?" I asked the army officer who was accompanying me.
"It's impossible to guarantee total safety," he replied.
"I see," I said. "Yes. By the way, how do you know when there's a mine in the road?"
"There's a big bang."
Salman Rushdie, Eating the Eggs of Love
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard Shaw
Alcohol is addictive and bad for you. I know that and still I love to drink. It's the little reward I give myself each day for not dying. It's something to do when there's nothing to do. It makes me feel good and for that I will take the drawbacks. That's settled, but not well enough for the people out to scare me into being satisfied with the gift of life and the stimulation that comes from within. They've stuck an "A" on my chest and spread the word that I am incurably diseased. They put ideas in the heads of friends, family and employers that I am sick and need help.
They talk of my drinking but never my thirst.
columnist in Austin Chronicle, 1987
She eventually tied this in with her opposition to gun control and urged the women in the audience to get handguns, apparently not only for self-defense. With little sympathy for women willing to live submissively in fear, she advised us: "The war is never over. It's time to turn the fear around."
from review of Lydia Lunch performance in 1991
Actually I would. I care that much about Sid. I care because he doesn't ... enough. In the beginning I wanted to not care too much, to allow him to just entertain me. Now I care a lot. If he's decided to want me I want him to want me non-stop. I want him to want me until he's so completely drenched with me, saturated with my mannerisms -- the cute ones, the gross ones, the ones that start out cute until you've seen them so many times they become gross -- until he's so disgusted with his own inability to live his life any way but vicariously through me, until he finds me so perfect in the arty mess of all my shortcomings and unrealized potential smeared across the apartment, until he wants to be me so much while simultaneously being so horrified of the thought that he'll have to kill me just to put a stop to the nightmare. The subject of his lifetime novel, the hard-on, the sexual anxiety, the neurotic obsession, the vertigo and salmonella and impetigo of a lifetime. Like some kind of dirt under his fingernails that's driving him crazy and will NEVER come out.
If he really wanted me it would be like that. Then I would know I was loved. Then I would think he really cared.
Sam D'Allesandro, The Zombie Pit
You see, what we have established here, Gloria and I, is your classic vicious cycle. One continues to inject the speed throughout the day for energy, dubious insight, and social interaction. Show me someone who's not stoned in this city and I'll show you someone with a well-worn television set. So after ten or maybe, as the old tolerance adjusts itself, twenty more repetitions of the ritual, one starts to feel a bit, well, nettled by evening ... so it's time for a few Valiums. The night comes, the shots continue, as do more Valiums, and you come to the point where you realize that it has been three days now without either food or sleep. You force down a cheeseburger, or some broiled shrimp at Max's, and you decide that this novelty known as sleep might be worth trying -- it seems that everyone's doing it. You're in luck because you notice that two booths over in Max's back room happens to be Rip Van W. (nobody's been able to find out what the last initial stands for), and he has a bagful of variegated little capsules that, when pressed out flat on the glass table top and lit from beneath, look like a collaborative painting done by Frank Stella and Larry Poons. The red ones are just what you want for your problem ... wait, no ... we don't like that word ... let's make that your "situation". And it is truly amazing, the way, after all that meth you have inflicted on yourself throughout three entire days, it takes only two of these pills to send you right off to sleep. And it goes on like this for a week, but now, instead of two of these red pills, it's suddenly become seven or eight. Conversely, you need more speed in that first wake-up shot, a more condensed solution, so to speak. And, of course, I use the word "solution" in a strictly pharmacological sense.
Jim Carroll, Downtown Diaries
Every day from nine to five I sit at my desk facing the door of the office and type up other people's dreams. Not just dreams. That wouldn't be practical enough for my bosses. I type up also people's daytime complaints: trouble with mother, trouble with father, trouble with the bottle, the bed, the headache that bangs home and blacks out the sweet world for no known reason. Nobody comes to our office unless they have troubles. Troubles that can't be pinpointed by Wassermanns or Wechsler-Bellevues alone. Maybe a mouse gets to thinking pretty early on how the whole world is run by these enormous feet. Well, from where I sit, I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all -- it's the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.
Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
We all enter this world in the same way: naked; screaming; soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn't have to stop there.
Dana Gould
If homosexuality is a disease, lets all call in queer to work: "Hello, can't work today. Still queer."
Robin Tyler
What would you like to come back as?
"A buzzard."
Why a buzzard?
"Because buzzards are nice and free. Nobody likes them. Nobody cares what they do. You don't have to worry about your friends or enemies. You're just out there, flapping away, having a good time, looking for something to eat."
from an interview with Truman Capote
I kissed each one of them in every part of their bodies. They were all dirty and appealed to me for just that reason.
Oscar Wilde on a six way with lower class rent boys
There are many aspects of the contemporary gay subculture that I find ridiculous, but nothing could be more ridiculous than to say, as some critics have, that I am anti-homosexual simply because I do not embrace every twitty gay fad that comes along. I think that a lifetime of listening to disco music is a high price to pay for one's sexual preference.
Quentin Crisp
I don't recognize you -- I've changed a lot.
Oscar Wilde
"Give me a shot," said the dwarf, "and I will tell you interesting things."
William S. Burroughs
I don't care what your sexual orientation is, you don't have to be drunk to want to have sex with Catherine DeNueve.
Susan Sarandon in The Celluloid Closet
Kafka understood this better than they when he wrote: "All these so-called diseases, pitiful as they look, are beliefs, the attempts of a human being in distress to cast his anchor in some mother soil." Psychotherapy will not get much further until it recognizes that the true significance of a neurosis is teleological, that the so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which the child has been patiently waiting -- had it not occurred, it would have found another, equally trivial -- in order to find a necessity and direction for its existence, in order that its life may become a serious matter. Of course it would be better if it could do without it, but unconsciously it knows that it is not, by itself, strong enough to learn to stand alone: a neurosis is a guardian angel; to become ill is to take vows. The questions with which Kafka dealt, the nature of his genius, have very little to do with his father; what the latter could do for him was to compel him to accept his vocation, to help him to resist the temptation to deny his vision by accepting a cosy conventional belief.
W.H. Auden
Yes: I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms.
Oscar Wilde, in prison
...that all those people who think of analysis as a device for getting a brand-new personality in place of their own would read Freud's warning: "A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get in accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world." Freud cannot be blamed for what journalists and literary folk have done with his ideas, but there are too many persons today who believe they have Freud's sanction for measuring their value and state of psychological health by the quantitative amount of sexual gratification they are getting, just as there are others who imagine that an unhappy childhood relieves them of all obligation to behave well.
W.H. Auden
Some of us have no choice, I am always telling my students. Some of us have to write in order to make sense of the world. Write out your obsessions, your fears, your curiosities and publish or not, I tell them, how much and why. Even as I say this to them, I know I am setting a trap -- the same one in which I have been caught. Writing is still revolutionary, writing is still about changing the world. Each of my students who tells the truth about their life becomes part of that process, and every piece they share with me challenges my own self-exploration pushes me to deeper work. Sex and lies, I believe, are the core of it. You may not be happy as writers, I tell them, echoing Bertha Harris, but you will know who you are and you will change the world.
Dorothy Allison
every time in life I go through a dry time, a period of deadness, I always do this: hold on to a set of words, the phrases of a kind of knowledge, even while they are dead and meaningless, but knowing that life will come back and make them live too. But how strange that one should hold on to a set of sentences, and have faith in them.
Doris Lessing
MUST PROCEED
e.e. cummings
This world's a vile oubliette. Yet in its refuse I will find the key to free me.
Angela Carter
I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde
Alcohol, Hashish, Prussic Acid, Strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Violence is the authentic proof of each one's loyalty to himself, to his passions, to his own will; radically to deny this is to to deny oneself any objective truth, it is to wall oneself up in an abstract subjectivity; anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
Simone de Beauvoir
Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let bombs cover the ground like rain. Because nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything.
curse, cited in Alice Walker essay
Killing Kyoto was one of the first things the Bush Administration did. This was supposed to be a decisive, take-charge, businesslike thing to do. After all, Kyoto had been hanging on like a zombie in the US Senate for years, unvoted-on, and even the treaty's best friends didn't like it. But, like a lot of left-wing intellectuals, Kyoto is much more effective as a martyr than it ever was as an administrator.
Bruce Sterling, marginal commentary in "Viridian
Note 00256: Political Developments", 11/07/2001
Why "normal" people should be so angry about someone else's deviance is an interesting question, but it's not one I want to confront every time I go out to buy a sandwich or walk through a museum. I have been an outsider all my life, and sometimes I get weak and long for the simpleminded pleasure of belonging, just being one more horned beast in the herd.
"Manliness", Patrick Califia-Rice,
Good Vibrations Magazine, June 2001
There was definitely an insider's culture at A16 [IMF protest in Washington, D.C. in 2001], especially at the convergence spaces. There was a vocabulary and behavior, an assumed cultural commonality, that was somewhat eerie. It seems that the ideals of absence of leadership and "facilitated chaos" -- as they say -- function best in a homogenous group.
from an advance copy of "Where was the Color
at A16 in D.C.?" by Colin Rajah, which will
appear in the forthcoming issue of ColorLines,
a national magazine of Race, Culture and Action
Working on the film, we immersed ourselves in a time when thousands and thousands and thousands of young people came here because they wanted to do a million different things, none of which included work. And the focus was absolutely not money. And to be making the movie in the peak of the dot-com thing, when thousands and thousands of young people were moving here exclusively for the purpose of making money. And that was very painful. I was angry a lot during the dot-com thing because of the way it juxtaposed with the movie. The way money was pouring around, it was so contrary to every image I'd ever had of San Francisco. You come here to be free. You come here to experiment. You come here to find yourself. You come here to do something that the rest of the culture doesn't normally give you a place to do. Why did this all of a sudden become a destination for the basest of human desires, which is money?
David Weissman, director of The Cockettes,
in interview in SF Examiner, 5/16/02
[Kevin, the narrator's roommate & lover, an actor & occasional hustler,] told me, "One day I was on a call and I walked into a hotel room and there was Tennessee Williams. I had a choice. Either I could gush and say, 'Oh, Mr. Williams, how you've enriched my life!' or I could march over to him and say, 'Lick my boots, dog.' I chose the latter and I could sense he was deeply grateful."
Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony
Punk fashion has always been protective armor. The spikes, the leather, the razors, the zippers, they are what you put on after flower-power has choked to death on its own vomit. It's Kevlar for the soft marshmallow core of youthful idealism.
Bruce Sterling, in an essay in Exploring The Matrix
And finally, it ought to be superfluous to observe -- but perhaps to anyone reading the book for the first time, it is not superfluous -- that the book is not a psychopathic study. The miseries that people suffer through their particular abnormalities of temperament are visible on the surface: the deeper design is that of the human misery and bondage which is universal. In normal lives this misery is mostly concealed; often, what is most wretched of all, concealed from the sufferer more effectively than from the observer. The sick man does not know what is wrong with him; he partly wants to know, and mostly wants to conceal the knowledge from himself. In the Puritan morality that I remember, it was tacitly assumed that if one was thrifty, enterprising, intelligent, practical and prudent in not violating social conventions, one ought to have a happy and "successful" life. Failure was due to some weakness or perversity peculiar to the individual; but the decent man need have no nightmares. It is now rather more common to assume that all individual misery is the fault of "society," and is remediable by alterations from without. Fundamentally the two philosophies, however different they may appear in operation, are the same. It seems to me that all of us, so far as we attach ourselves to created objects and surrender our wills to temporal ends, are eaten by the same worm.
T.S. Eliot, introduction to Djuna Barnes' Nightwood
It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's self in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society." He declared that "a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much courage as a foot-pad," - "that honor and religion have never stood in the way of a well-considered and a firm resolve." This was manly, as the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would have found himself often enough "in formal opposition" to what are deemed "the most sacred laws of society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)
I only take drugs that enhance the folly, the pageantry, the foolishness, the lie, Rose said.
Tom Spanbauer, In The City Of Shy Hunters
Excessive religious devotion is a very strong characteristic of the mentally ill. That doesn't mean there's something inherently wrong with religion, just that it's a simplified paradigm for interpreting the world, and damaged minds often seem to thrive in limited ontologies.
Michael Marshall Smith, interview,
The Third Alternative #31 (Summer 2002)
Anne smiled and said, "My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company."
"You are mistaken," said he gently, "that is not good company, that is the best. Good company requires only birth, education and manners, and with regard to manners is not very nice. Birth and good manners are essential; but a little learning is by no means a dangerous thing in good company, on the contrary, it will do very well."
Jane Austen, Persuasion
I'm frightened for what's going to come because I feel we're a very visible target now. We're not so very different from European Jewry in the '30s. We're accepted in certain sophisticated urban quarters, in our ghettos, and nice people don't openly say mean things about us, but lots of people would like to see us dead.
Tony Kushner, spring 1993, interview by Craig Lucas
[speaking of ahistorical productions of Brecht] And there is a desire to be apostate about a tradition about which one knows nothing, and apostasy by uninformed heretics is really uninteresting.
Tony Kushner, November 1994, telephone
interview/discussion with Carl Weber on Brecht
Interviewer: With the elevation of standards has also come an elevation in the level of recognition. Now that some out queers win Pulitzers and National Book Awards, does this make it easier for the others to succeed, or harder?
Both, probably. When you have a higher standard it becomes more daunting and the threat of silencing people who are intimidated is greater. High aesthetic standards in the absence of progressive democratic actions will eventually create an elite. On the other hand, I think high aesthetic standards combined with progressive democratic politics is something that one would aspire to. I don't think we want to try and keep the level artificially down so that everybody can just join in. But as long as people are being actively encouraged -- as they are whenever there is a viable movement -- people will come into their own voices.
Tony Kushner, January 26, 1995, interview by
Michael Lowenthal before the fifth OutWrite, in Boston
He [Hugh Kenner, on Goethe] says that the job of the epic poet is to become, while writing the poem in public, the poet worthy of finishing it.
Tony Kushner, April 12, 1995, public
panel discussion at Northwestern University
For me, as I think is true for most Jewish homosexuals, the business of claiming an identity, the business of coming out of the closet, the business of learning one of the central lessons of the Holocaust, which is that, as Hannah Arendt says, it's better to be a pariah than a parvenu. If you're hated by a social order, don't try and make friends with it. Identify yourself as other, and identify your determining characteristics as those characteristics which make you other and unliked and despised.
Tony Kushner, April 26, 1995,
interview with Rabbi Norman J. Cohen
I'm tremendously influenced by Shakespeare -- everybody is, in the sense that that's the Parnassus. You spend your life wishing that you could write two seconds of material that compare to the least graceful two seconds that Shakespeare wrote. It's very depressing actually because it doesn't seem to be human. It's from Mars or something.
Tony Kushner, December 9, 1995, interview by Kim Myers, on PBS
(The preceding half-dozen Tony Kushner quotes are from Tony Kushner In Conversation, Ed. Robert Vorlicky, 1998, University of Michigan Press)
Next to this central belief, which, while I was reading, would be constantly in motion from my inner self to the outer world, towards the discovery of Truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime. These were the events which took place in the book I was reading. It is true that the people concerned in them were not what Francoise would have called "real people." But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a "real" person awaken in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of "real" people would be a decided improvement. A "real" person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
But when a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomena -- an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Is there such extraordinary need of misery to make beauty? Let go Hell; and your fall will be broken by the roof of Heaven.
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
[speaking of lobbying against capital punishment]It's not satisfying. It's frustrating, but it makes me feel like I'm not doing nothing. And I'm not comfortable with doing nothing.
Steve Earle, interview on salon.com, 08/29/02
Originally, writing prose was an exercise because I'm scared of not writing because I didn't write for four years. It turns out that all I have to do is not spend my whole day running around trying to find dope and I write just fine.
Steve Earle, interview on Salon.com, 08/29/02
You’ve also said that you believe most horror novels are failures. And this tends to be the case most often when the novel is structured around the horror element instead of the characters?
I probably wouldn't phrase it that strongly today -- certainly there are quite a few really fine horror novels out there. I think now I would phrase that issue in terms of the challenges facing the horror novelist -- and those challenges are rather significant. Too many horror novels I read either have the structure of the protagonist's world thrown into disarray because of one supernatural event/set of events, or the story which follows one character's dark obsession to its logical conclusion. With very little deviation in the story line from this main plot. Certainly you can get a great compactness out of such structures, and some novelists have managed to make these stories interesting at length, but I think these are essentially short story structures which become bloated and empty when blown up to novel length. Many horror novels, I think, should have been stopped when they reached novella length.
Novels require context -- the challenge for the horror writer is to come up with a fully-developed context for the horrors in the story. Certainly horror is an emotion, but life is made up of many emotions, and we may shift through all of them during the course of a single day. And our fears also exist within a context of daily pressures and imagined failings and a melody of anxieties. I'd like to see more novels which utilize this wider view -- making the horror merely one element of many.
Steve Tem, interviewed in Hellnotes, 10/13/00
"It's difficult now, but there's activity and people making deals," said Leland Whitney, managing principal of Whitney Cressman, a commercial real estate firm. "It's just a question of when the Bay Area is going to have its next disruptive technology, and we'll be back."
Sign of the times: Cities stuck with too much
office space, Brian Bergstein, AP Business
Writer, www.sfgate.com., 04/14/02
We love a sentence not because of what it means so much as the manner and intensity with which it makes its meaning vivid.
Samuel R. Delany, interview in Argosy #1, Jan./Feb. 2004
YG: Are you a top or a bottom?
David: What?
YG: (quick hand motion)
David: Oh. (pause) I'm, um, versatile.
YG: Bottom. Wow. Good. This will work out well. Wanna get out here?
Six Feet Under, Season 1, 7th episode.
David, and a younger guy, on a date,
having a drink in a restaurant.
Down, down, down, into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Dirge Without Music"
Morbid? You make me laugh. This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid. Look at my life. Look at the life around me. Where is the beauty that I am supposed to miss? The nice episodes that others depict? Is not everything morbid? I mean the life of people stripped of their masks. Where are the relieving features?
Djuna Barnes, responding to a critic
True wit should break a wise man's heart. It should strike at the exact point of weakness and it should scar. It should rest on a pillar of truth and not on a gelatin base, and the truth is not so shameful that it cannot be recorded.
* * *
Wits are never happy people. The anguish that has scraped their nerves and left them raw to every flicker of life is the base of wit—for the raw nerve reacts at once without any agent, the reaction is direct, with no integumentary obstacles. Wit is the cry of pain, the true word that pierces the heart. If it does not pierce, then it is not true wit. True wit should break a good man's heart.
Dawn Powell, diary entries
Some Sloganeering
Cruise Men Not Missles
That's Mr. Faggot to You
Some Deaths Take Forever
All's fair in love and war -- and this is both.
Avenge Oscar Wilde
Richard Cory died in the closet.
Have You Hugged Your Psychosis Today?
Save Soviet Jews! Win valuable prizes!