Tag: quotes

MARTIN AMIS QUOTES

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Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.

You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.

I hire tea by the tea bag.

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.

If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

KURT VONNEGUT QUOTES

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“I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.” —Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, 1974 (and the dedication to And So It Goes, 2011)

“I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any ‘Good Old Days,’ there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, ‘Don’t look at me. I just got here myself.’” — Syracuse University Commencement speech, 1994

“I had a friend who was a heavy drinker. If somebody asked him if he’d been drunk the night before, he would always answer offhandedly, ‘Oh, I imagine.’ I’ve always liked that answer. It acknowledges life as a dream.” — The Paris Review, 1977

“All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.” — The epigram of Timequake, 1997

“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.” — Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, 1974

“I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.” — as quoted in The Observer, 1987

“Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible, and The Charge of the Light Brigade…” — “Cold Turkey, In These Times, 2004

“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.” — “Cold Turkey, In These Times, 2004

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” — A Man Without a Country, 2005

“I don’t know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.’” — A Man Without a Country, 2005

“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” — A Man Without a Country, 2005

“If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.” — The Paris Review, 1977

“We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.” — A Man Without a Country, 2005

“Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward — and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.” — “Palm Sunday”, a sermon delivered at St. Clement’s Church, New York City, originally published in The Nation as “Hypocrites You Always Have With You”

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” — the introduction to Mother Night, 1961

“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’” — “Knowing What’s Nice,” In These Times, 2003

“I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can’t help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.” — interview on the Daily Show, 2005

“Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.” — Backwards City Review, 2004

“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.” — The Paris Review, 1977

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” — quoted in “Kurt Vonnegut: In His Own Words,” London Times Online, 2007

HARUKI MURAKAMI QUOTES

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Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore

I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, South of the Border, West of the Sun

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen. I just wait.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Paris Review, summer 2004

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance Dance Dance

Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they’re also what tear you apart.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore

I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Sputnik Sweetheart

Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, A Wild Sheep Chase

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Norwegian Wood

I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Paris Review, summer 2004

If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don’t know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Sputnik Sweetheart

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Sputnik Sweeheart

Life is not like water. Things in life don’t necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, 1Q84

There’s no such thing as perfect writing just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

HURAKI MURAKAMI, Hear the Wind Sing

I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.

HURAKI MURAKAMI, Paris Review, summer 2004

Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Sputnik Sweetheart

Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can’t even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It’s like my body’s split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We’re running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Only the Dead stay seventeen forever.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Norwegian Wood

Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it’s time to drink.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

It’s hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore

Money had no name of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

There are ways of dying that don’t end in funerals. Types of death you can’t smell.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore

The light of morning decomposes everything.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, A Wild Sheep Chase

Mediocrity’s like a spot on a shirt—it never comes off.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance Dance Dance

To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore

Waste is the highest virtue one can achieve in advanced capitalist society.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance, Dance, Dance

Spring as concept raged in upon us, a somber tide of longing. Its advent roused the passions of those nameless multitudes fallen between the cracks of the city, sweeping them noiselessly toward the quicksands of futility.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance, Dance, Dance

Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore

The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.

HURAKI MURAKAMI, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore

No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman