Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.
This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.
The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.
I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.
If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.
Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving?
Not having a passport makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since I know I'll never see it.
For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.
The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.
Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.
You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.
It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.
I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.
Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
....basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste.
I knew my limitations and the limitations of the courts I played on, and adjusted thusly. I was at my best in bad conditions.
The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.
There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.
The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier").
The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.
The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.