If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.
Blaise Pascal

I think confusion is the truth, except sometimes when I'm feeling it, ha ha.
Dennis Cooper

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Philip K. Dick

Be realistic - demand the impossible!
Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968

Even if there's a secret one-world government controlling it all, I'm having an okay time.
Andrew W.K.

Committees kill not only their members but all of their ideas.
William Gass

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Clay Shirky

It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
Don DeLillo

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We do not think our way to right action. We act our way to right thinking.
David Milch

It's all, all, all in together now / We gettin paid gettin dressed for the weather now
Ol' Dirty Bastard

Don't you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?
Calvin Coolidge

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
Thomas Jefferson

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert

Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.
Kurt Vonnegut

I have no idea; I'm just an old cowboy. I just write books.
Percival Everett

It's a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.
Henry Moore

Once you label me you negate me.
Søren Kierkegaard

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.
Mark Twain

People in love are in fact condemned to go on learning the other's language indefinitely, groping around, seeking out the keys - keys that are always revocable. Love is a labyrinth of misunderstandings whose way out doesn't exist.
Jacques-Alain Miller

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The greatest works convert us to their aesthetic faith.
William Deresiewicz

We're trying to build birds, not birdhouses.
Dean Young

I was heartened, a few months ago, to discover in the journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson that a decade before he died, he realized that a safer way to read a Shakespeare play is backwards; otherwise, the interest of the story is sadly in the way of poetry.
Gary Lutz

If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.
Woody Allen

Style is repetition.
Merce Cunningham

The matured idea is enough in itself to destroy most people.
Thomas Bernhard

I was surprised he did that... I was ready for it.
Ron Artest

If it is familiar, it has not eaten you yet.
Robert Zajonc

When the meaning is too full for myth to be able to invade it, myth goes around it, and carries it away bodily.
Roland Barthes

I'll gamble on heads, they last longer.
Frances Marion

Be in the middle of things, but be in the center of nothing.
Gilles Deleuze

don't worry... today's dickinsons & blakes won't sit idly around, waiting, hoping for attention to descend on them... and thus remain unknown... they will know the world needs to hear their voices, and they will be consequently burdened with the responsibility... to take its ear by force... and master the poetry of self-promotion
Mark Leidner

But I was often taught that everything is worth it for art. Everything. It was a cult.
Barry Hannah

One thing to remember: You are no more special for putting your pen to paper than anyone with lungs.
Blake Butler

To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language?
Gilles Deleuze

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman

This is the beginning of true modernity: to experience your own cultural background as ultimately contingent, irrelevant.
Slavoj Žižek

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of "generalization" of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple.
David Foster Wallace

We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists.
Thomas Jefferson

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
Stanley Kubrick

To suffer in silence is the most generous thing a person can do but also the loneliest.
Vicki Baumann

You are going to feel pain. But the question is: are you going to suffer?
Haruki Murakami

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.
Kurt Vonnegut

People are standing in line for a hot dog?
Michael Kimball

The problem with the Milky Way is that we are inside the Milky Way.
Alan McConnachie

There is a lesson in vomiting—when the mind finally forgets, the body remembers.
Zak Smith

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Ludwig Wittgenstein