“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. ‘War and Peace’ must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.”
~Anthony Burgess; british author and composer.
“Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.”
~Ayn Rand; russo-american author and philosopher.
“We’re not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader’s own life outside the story changes the story.”
~David Foster Wallace; american author and satirist.
“I think the function of suffering is to let me know that my perception is skewed; what I’m doing is judging natural events in such a way that I am creating suffering within myself. For instance, you have pain over certain conditions, certain situations that occur. And if you just say ‘ok, here I am, I’m going to experience the pain,’ you don’t suffer. The resistance and the degree of the resistance to the natural phenomenon of life causes tremendous suffering.”
~Hubert Selby Jr.; american author.
“If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.”
~Frank Herbert; american author.
“Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.”
~Jean-Paul Sartre; french author and philosopher.
“Cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”
~Ambrose Bierce; american author, critic and satirist.
“To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.”
~Katherine Mansfield; new zealand author and critic.
“You’re caught in a labyrinth of choice and possibility in the world today so you have more opportunity to express your desire, fulfill your desire, sin if you like. The thin line between paradise and ‘The Devil’s Circus’. The agony and the internal ecstasy. I try to resonate this.”
~’Youth’ Martin Glover; british musician, producer and artist.
“Music is prophecy: its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible.” ‘Noise’ (1977)
~Jacques Atalli; french author and economist.