Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he's peeing on a tree...Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often.
But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.
There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free.
Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.
Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.
God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.
All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.
I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.
Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.
I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point.
In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator.
He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.
To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.
I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.
That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.
The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.
If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
I want to tell you,' the voice on the phone said. 'My head is filled with things to say.' ... 'I don't mind,' Hal said softly. 'I could wait forever.' 'That's what you think,' the voice said. The connection was cut.
I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship's Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet...I now know the precise mixocological difference between a Slippery Nipple and a fuzzy navel.
Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" "I give." "You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.
...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux.
I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.
I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.
I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.
Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses - places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.
The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.
What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.
The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life's meaning.
Many people in America throw the term "fascism" around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state.
At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum's axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.
If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default-setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.
Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith. . . . Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.
Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.
Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection.
What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?
You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.
Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.