Transgressive Fiction

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Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

David Peace, Nineteen Seventy Four

I was miles and years away and then suddenly aware my hour was at hand, feeling all their eyes on me.

Franz Kafka

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

It’s like someone who prays every night saying God’s a good listener. Just because you’re talking to us doesn’t mean we’re listening. With me and God, you never really know.

Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG

She was like a redneck Yoko Ono.

Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth

… her skills more akin to the baking of macaroons than solving the complexities of the universe.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

Joan Didion

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

David Peace, Nineteen Seventy Four

Uncle Eric holding court, proud the only time he ever left Yorkshire was to kill Germans.

Niccolò Machiavelli

I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.

Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.

Marquis de Sade

Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and other stories

Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank — but that’s not the same thing.

Franz Kafka, The Trial

It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.

Arthur Koestler

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries

they’re fucking up minds they do not own.

Megan Abbott

When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control it all.

Lionel Shriver, Checker and the Derailleurs

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can’t have that they don’t think for a second about whether they really want it.

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

…the greatest source of misery in the world, the greatest cause of anguish and hatred and sadness and death, was neither disease nor race nor religion. It was hope.

Franz Kafka

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

Franz Kafka

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

It takes more than one kick in the pants to reverse a lifetime of unplanned apathy.

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

I thought at the time that I couldn’t be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that’s a common conceit, that you’ve already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

Megan Abbott, The Fever

I have another friend who gets what I’m really like, and I get her. She scares me. Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

M Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

To begin with, I had never done any good deeds; besides, even if I had simply fabricated a few, I would not have enjoyed going on about them.

David Peace, The Damned Utd

You wake up and for those few seconds, minutes, you forget; forget you are injured; forget you are finished.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

Which do you prefer, she says. Sex or Violence? I try to smile. What’s the difference, really.

Paul Neilan

Nobody knows how to just shut the fuck up and look out the window anymore.

Blake Butler

black beyond black

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

We live as we dream–alone….

M Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

Finally, when all was said and done, the certainty (so often experienced, yet always new) that female charms, the kind that inflame the senses, are no more than kitchen smells: they tease you when you’re hungry and disgust you when you’ve had your fill.

Franz Kafka

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Marquis de Sade

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

Whenever I’m leaving I get sentimental for that nostalgia I know I won’t have the next day.

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations

Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG

Do you understand why I prefer you to have a toy gun?

Franz Kafka

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.

Arthur Nersesian, Manhattan Loverboy

The masses-I love em-they rush for red lights, risking everything to capture a few seconds, only to get home and waste their lives.

Arthur Nersesian, The Fuck-Up

Perhaps the price of comfort is that life passes more rapidly. But for anyone who has lived in uneasiness, even for a short, memorable duration, it’s a trade-off that will gladly be made.

Jim Carroll

You see, you just don’t know I’m here to give you my heart And you want some fashion show

Marquis de Sade

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

A C Weisbecker

If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.

Joan Didion

You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.

Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

A C Weisbecker, Cosmic Banditos

Either the present part of the story slowed down a bit and waited for the past part to catch up, or the past part speeded up and overtook the present part.

M Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

And if all womankind banded together and took the male path, the world would turn into one huge brothel.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer “Nothing.” The thought went through my mind that it didn’t make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.

Arthur Nersesian, The Fuck-Up

As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness– the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string.

Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

I put the girl’s teeth shaped like my mother’s teeth into my own mouth and on her teeth I chewed until I heard my own teeth in my head breaking and I swallowed and I smiled.

Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: A Con Artist’s Masquerade

Do you know the difference between neurotics and psychotics? Neurotics build castles in the sky; psychotics move into them.

Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

Blood helicopters chopped across my slim cerebrum like fresh diamonds, rings in screaming on small hands coming awake inside my linings, each after its own way to reach beyond me.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle.

Chuck Klosterman

People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation.

Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.

Paul Auster, Invisible

You’re too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

Disappear, she says. I love that word.

Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall!

Franz Kafka

I am free and that is why I am lost.

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

And my life went to pieces, like a love letter in the rain.

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

Kugel was a firm believer that death was not always a bad thing – that life often reached such levels of crapitude that dying was preferable to living.

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Arthur Koestler

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

Jim Thompson

Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.

Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.

Marquis de Sade

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!

Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man’s brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn’t understand you at all.

Joseph Conrad, Chance

Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.

Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.

Franz Kafka

There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us.

Paul Auster, Oracle Night

It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don’t know half as much as I think I do.

Paul Auster

You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn’t just naive it’s a vanity.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

Jim Thompson

There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.

Marquis de Sade

It is only by way of pain one arrives at pleasure

Lauren Sapala, Between the Shadow and Lo

I told most people I was an alcoholic if they asked and some if they didn’t. I figured everyone deserved a fair chance to cut and run at the very beginning.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

Sitting on my stool I thought of a bumper sticker: “If Mean People Suck, Why Isn’t My Dick In Your Mouth?

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

Tell me the manner in which a patient commits suicide and I’ll tell you how he can be cured

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

The world is your oyster… …too bad you’re allergic to shellfish.

Will Self

Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

Will Christopher Baer

Sorrow is like the ocean and sometimes I wish my heart would stop.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes

David Peace, Nineteen Seventy Four

My father used to say, ‘If you want to know the artist, look at the art’. He was usually talking about Stanley Matthews or Don Bradman when he said it.

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

I am so stupid, so easily fooled. It’s really almost funny. If I could lift a finger I would gladly kill myself.

Stephen Graham Jones, After the People Lights Have Gone Off

But at some point you have to just decide that if a bear’s going to eat you, a bear’s going to eat you, and then you go about your day.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

We’re all wanting things we don’t understand. things we can’t even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.

Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

I’m a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

Ages fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something — anything — to begin.

Blake Butler, Scorch Atlas

Overhead the sky was melting, the cracked cream color rubbing off in cogs of brine. The fields far ahead of me in endless pudding, studded here and there with what had been: homes and houses, hair and heirlooms, habits, hallways, hauntings, hope.

Stephen Graham Jones, The Least of My Scars

Don’t let anybody ever tell you life’s fair. Not as long as I’m in it.

Arthur Koestler

I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

We got married: society’s solution to loneliness, lust and laundry.

Aldous Huxley

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden

Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it’s okay to be a boy; for girls it’s like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?

George Orwell, Animal Farm

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Ray Bradbury

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

Ryū Murakami

She’s like smoke:you think you’re seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for her there’s nothing there

Will Self

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

Nick Cave

People think I’m a miserable sod but it’s only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

None of us really has anything to lose. That makes it easier to give away.

James Joyce

Shut your eyes and see.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.

Iain Banks

It’s a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those

George Orwell, 1984

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

George Orwell

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

Tama Janowitz, Slaves of New York

I don’t like him…he makes me feel like he’s going to throw me in a coffin and walk around on top of it.

Martin Amis

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

Ray Bradbury

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

James Joyce, Ulysses

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Poppy Z Brite

The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.

Albert Camus

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

Crowd was to be pleased. Crowd was to be worshipped and feared. Ultimately, Crowd was to be made sacrifice unto.

George Orwell, 1984

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Philip K Dick

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

George Orwell, 1984

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Poppy Z Brite, Lost Souls

If you want something, you don’t wait for the world to deal it out for you. You take it.

Poppy Z Brite

Why bother? I was right all along: the second you make yourself vulnerable to someone, they start drawing blood.

Dennis Cooper, Closer

Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn’t actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.

James Joyce

Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly

I have seen myself backward.

Martin Amis, The Second Plane: 14 Responses to September 11

Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.

Tama Janowitz, Slaves of New York

I had a hunger for things I knew realistically I didn’t actually care for.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Logic is what the devil likes most.

William Golding

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

Martin Amis, The Information

He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.

Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.

Aldous Huxley

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Dennis Cooper, Frisk

Human bodies are such garbage bags.

Jack Kerouac

Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.

George Orwell, 1984

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Georges Bataille

The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

George Orwell, 1984

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Allen Ginsberg

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

Ian McEwan

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality

George Orwell, 1984

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

William Golding

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.

Georges Bataille, Violent Silence

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

Jack Kerouac

I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

Poppy Z Brite, Wormwood: A Collection of Short Stories

You hold onto what you have; you do not give it up easily, even when you know it is poisoning you.

Kurt Vonnegut

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

Albert Camus

Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?

Kathy Acker, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.

Allen Ginsberg

Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.

George Orwell, 1984

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

Kathy Acker

If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you. I want everything.

Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro

I am damned,’ thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.

Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

Parents, teachers, government – they all teach you how to live the dreary , deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

Richard Bachman, Rage

Lunacy is when you can’t see the seams where they stitched the world together anymore.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

Martin Amis, Other People

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

George Orwell, 1984

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Mothers are all slightly insane.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

The longer you went without speaking, the harder it gets to break the silence.

Iain Banks

Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot

George Orwell

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey

I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.

Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

George Orwell, 1984

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

Ryū Murakami

Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody else’s story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity.

George Orwell

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Ray Bradbury

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Philip K Dick, VALIS

There exists, for everyone, a sentence – a series of words – that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you’re lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.

Georges Bataille

In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation.

George Orwell, 1984

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

Christa Faust

I hate malls. They’re like strip clubs for women. All tease and sparkle and the empty promise that if you just drop enough cash, somehow you’ll be fulfilled.

Albert Camus

Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead Walk beside me… just be my friend

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.

Dennis Cooper, Closer

I’m a talentless but popular young singer and I have the feeling someone is watching me. I use the term loosely because I have few feelings, and even they’re too simple, like primary colors.

Richard Bachman, Thinner

The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn’t believe what he’s seeing.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Iain Banks, Use of Weapons

I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.

Will Self

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you’re someone else.

Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.

Alissa Nutting, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

I was like a turd inside someone who’d accidentally swallowed an engagement ring: I was nothing, yet I carried something uniquely special.

Alissa Nutting, Tampa

There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn’t really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.

R D Ronald

Today I plan to smile a lot, only so people who know me will be freaked the fuck out.

Ken Kesey, Kesey’s Garage Sale

It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

There’s nothing better than being the bad guy. Long enough to do some good.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

They can’t tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

Suicide should come with a warning label: ‘Do not try this alone.’

Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream

Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done.

R D Ronald

Anyone who says “Trust me” is the last motherfucker you should ever trust.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

The fig tree had dropped its fruit all over the ground. Ripe figs lay in the dust, exploded, bloody, as if the sky had rained organs.

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

We were left with nothing because of a love like acid that ate its way through our entire family.

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Not a visible enthusiasm but a hidden one, an excitement burning with a cold flame.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

Monica Drake, The Folly of Loving Life

I thought I was old, back then. I thought I was grown up. I didn’t know all my big mistakes were up ahead of me, still to come. Always.

R D Ronald

I’m the biggest critic of my own work, but sometimes you nail a chapter so good that you have to take a step back and admire that bitch.

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

When life sucks, throw yourself into art.

Rupert Thomson, Secrecy

Perhaps there comes a time in your life when you lose the ability to command attention, when the world starts to ignore you because it no longer believes you can have much of an effect on it.

Charles Bukowski, Barfly

I don’t hate them…I just feel better when they’re not around.

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

The only value of wasted time is knowledge.

R D Ronald

The best writers tend to look the roughest in photos. At least that’s the excuse I use for why I look so bad in mine.

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

You have to die a few times before you can really live.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Penelope Lively, How it all Began

When you are able to be with a person and there is no need to talk, something has happened.

Kola Boof, The Sexy Part of the Bible

But somehow, once you start playing behind the steering wheel of God, you realize just how powerful it is to be the imagination driving the natural world (64).

Anaïs Nin

Ordinary life does not interest me.

Bret Easton Ellis

Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.

Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

We’d be dead. Big deal. Death’s not such a long drop these days. Not for us.

Violet Levoit, I Miss The World

Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “9/11.” “I shouldn’t even.” “No, come on.” “9/11 who?” “You swore you’d never forget.

William S Burroughs

I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

J G Ballard

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

I felt so heavy with love. I could feel it packed inside my chest.

Douglas Coupland, Life After God

And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one.

William S Burroughs

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

I have to return some videotapes

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

There is no God and we are his prophets.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone’s comfort

Matthew Stokoe, Cows

He was adrift in their world, unsure of his significance, and to open himself to a point where conversation could take place would only have revealed how unlike them he was.

Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

A person’s life story is equal to what they have plus what they want most in the world, minus what they’re actually willing to sacrifice for it.

Matthew Stokoe, Cows

The Guernsey’s eyes were deep and brown and Steven knew that the curl of its lips was a small cow smile.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

William S Burroughs

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

I was not a lovable child, and I’d grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

He looked both proud and guilty of something. As if happiness was a reward and he wasn’t sure he’d done enough to deserve it.

J G Ballard, Crash

After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

That’s what birthdays were. Days when you found out where you stood. Who was on your side and who wasn’t. Nothing to do with how old you were.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great.

Anaïs Nin

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial – you’d think all women do is clean and bleed.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

Hunter S Thomson, Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

Over the previous six months, there was only one thing Gage had become more efficient at than killing… and that was dying.

Anaïs Nin

I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

She had become an integral part of my life—just not the part with all the death.

Charles Bukowski

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

Disappear here

Anaïs Nin

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

R D Ronald

This faulty light fitting at the front door with the dangerously flickering bulb looks rather festive. Who says I don’t do Christmas?

William S Burroughs

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream

I suspect there will never be a requiem for a dream, simply because it will destroy us before we have the opportunity to mourn it’s passing.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

Anthony Burgess, Homage To QwertYuiop: Essays

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

Denis Johnson, Already Dead

I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me…I’m the one happening.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.

J G Ballard, Crash

I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

Vladimir Nabokov

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

Sylvia Plath

Is there no way out of the mind?

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

I’d rather wear bare skin than raw silk any day.

Charles Bukowski

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

We’re waiting for a glance or a word, some acknowledgement that we are here.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream

He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time comprehend.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

The world is on fire; time is a bomb. Ten thousand years are not enough When so much remains to be done

Henry Miller

Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.

Hunter S Thomson

Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.

Sylvia Plath

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.

J G Ballard

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

Philip K Dick

The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.

Alissa Nutting, Tampa

His eyes took in the details of my body with a conflicted gaze that I knew well: even having seen all the facts of the case, he still wanted me. He wanted me despite knowing what that meant about him.

Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel

Listen, ah don’t wanna speak ill of the dead but have ah told you that mah mother was a great whopping whale of a cunt? Well she was precisely that – a great whopping whale of a hog’s cunt with a dirty maggot for a brain.

Aldous Huxley

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Philip K Dick, Martian Time-Slip

I’m not much but I’m all I have.

George Orwell, 1984

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Iain Banks

It’s a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those

Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

James Joyce

Shut your eyes and see.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.

Martin Amis, House of Meetings

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

Martin Amis, Other People

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Mothers are all slightly insane.

Aldous Huxley

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

James Joyce

Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

Martin Amis

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

George Orwell, 1

Big Brother is Watching You.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

Crowd was to be pleased. Crowd was to be worshipped and feared. Ultimately, Crowd was to be made sacrifice unto.

Allen Ginsberg

I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I’ll never be sane.

Aldous Huxley

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

George Orwell

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Will Self

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

Poppy Z Brite

When you have too much faith in something, it’s bound to hurt you. Too much faith in anything will suck you dry. In this way, all the world is a vampire.

Philip K Dick

If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.

Martin Amis, London Fields

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

Nick Cave

Inspiration is a word used by people who aren’t really doing anything.

Ray Bradbury

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

Albert Camus

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself

Hate can be just as intimate as love.

Lauren Sapala, Between the Shadow and Lo

Most people don’t like to admit that vaginas have economic value, but they’re one of our most valuable natural resources.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

D H Lawrence

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

William Golding, Pincher Martin

Worse than madness. Sanity.

George Orwell, 1984

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

Alissa Nutting, Tampa

There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?

James Joyce, Ulysses

And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

Philip K Dick

There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.

Albert Camus

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

Iain Banks, Against a Dark Background

Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

Dennis Cooper, Frisk

Human bodies are such garbage bags.

Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

They don’t realise that they’ve changed; they think it’s the world that changed.

George Orwell, Animal Farm

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Aldous Huxley

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

The longer you went without speaking, the harder it gets to break the silence.

George Orwell, 1984

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

Allen Ginsberg

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

Nick Cave

People think I’m a miserable sod but it’s only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?

Alissa Nutting, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

I was like a turd inside someone who’d accidentally swallowed an engagement ring: I was nothing, yet I carried something uniquely special.

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

When a child grows old enough to know J.R.R. Tolkien was just staring at a typewriter, the truth can be a wounding exposé.

Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears.

Knut Hamsun

Love is every bit as violent and dangerous as murder.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.

Jack Kerouac

Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

Allen Ginsberg

Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

Truth is neither objectivity nor the balanced view; truth is a selfless subjectivity.

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.

Dennis Cooper, Closer

Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn’t actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.

George Orwell

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Will Self

I’m going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash – yet I do not fear this.

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

George Orwell, 1984

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

Ryū Murakami

She’s like smoke:you think you’re seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for her there’s nothing there

D H Lawrence, The Complete Poems

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Ray Bradbury

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ryū Murakami

Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody else’s story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity.

Richard Bachman, Rage

That was Dad’s life, and I was the birdshit on his windshield.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you’re someone else.

Kurt Vonnegut

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

Parents, teachers, government – they all teach you how to live the dreary , deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

Kurt Vonnegut

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Poppy Z Brite

Why bother? I was right all along: the second you make yourself vulnerable to someone, they start drawing blood.

James Joyce

All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.

Georges Bataille

The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.

Kathy Acker

For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other.

William Golding

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

Georges Bataille

I don’t want your love unless you know i am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.

George Orwell, 1984

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Richard Bachman, Roadwork

All places are the same unless your mind changes. There’s no magic place to get your mind right. If you feel like shit, everything you see looks like shit.

Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

George Orwell, 1984

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

Will Self

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

Jim Carroll

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It’s an universal law– intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.

Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel

And Satan sighed and shook his head, played harp amongst the flames. ‘It’s Hell up there in Heaven too, for all that that is worth. Heaven is just a lie of mine to make it Hell on Earth.

William Golding

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden

Vladimir Nabokov

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture.

Charles Bukowski, Barfly

I don’t hate them…I just feel better when they’re not around.

Sylvia Plath

Is there no way out of the mind?

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that’s not the one. When you meet your ‘soul mate’ you’ll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

Sometimes what I wouldn’t give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.

Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream

He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time comprehend.

Anaïs Nin

Ordinary life does not interest me.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

A lot of people lacked that gift: knowing when to fuck off.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

The world is on fire; time is a bomb. Ten thousand years are not enough When so much remains to be done

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

I have to return some videotapes

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

But what I do I do because I like to do.

Violet Levoit, I Miss The World

Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “9/11.” “I shouldn’t even.” “No, come on.” “9/11 who?” “You swore you’d never forget.

Irvine Welsh, Porno

You can’t lie to your soul.

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

One week I’m helping to end a life, the next I’m stepping in to save one. Seemingly dichotomous acts, but actually one in the same.

Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

Hunter S Thomson

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

R D Ronald

I don’t “lol”. I tried it once but it just didn’t agree with me.

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

She had become an integral part of my life—just not the part with all the death.

Douglas Coupland

I don’t think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.

Anaïs Nin

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that? It’s the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.

Sylvia Plath

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.

Anaïs Nin

How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

Hunter S Thomson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman

A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

Vladimir Nabokov

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.

J G Ballard, Crash

I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.

William S Burroughs

Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

J G Ballard, Running Wild

In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.

enis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place

Irvine Welsh

Some people are easier to love when you don’t have to be around them.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

I’d rather wear bare skin than raw silk any day.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

That’s one of the drawbacks of good narcotics—they often cause you to say cheerful things.

Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus

In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other’s sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week.

Hunter S Thomson, Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

Denis Johnson, Already Dead

I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me…I’m the one happening.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I have found God, but he is insufficient.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

Sometimes truths are what we run from, and sometimes they are what we seek.

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

He looked both proud and guilty of something. As if happiness was a reward and he wasn’t sure he’d done enough to deserve it.

J G Ballard

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

Monica Drake, The Folly of Loving Life

I thought I was old, back then. I thought I was grown up. I didn’t know all my big mistakes were up ahead of me, still to come. Always.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

I asked the cardiologist why an electrocardiogram was called an EKG, instead of an ECG. He said, “Nazis. Nazis invented the machine.” After he left, I found a napkin on my breakfast tray and wrote that down: EKG = Nazis.

Vladimir Nabokov

Our imagination flies — we are its shadow on the earth.

Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

No one ever likes the right person.

Irvine Welsh

I’m not running away, I’m moving on.

Charles Bukowski, Post Office

I wanted the whole world or nothing.

Charles Bukowski

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

R D Ronald

The best writers tend to look the roughest in photos. At least that’s the excuse I use for why I look so bad in mine.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

We’re waiting for a glance or a word, some acknowledgement that we are here.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

There is no God and we are his prophets.

Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

I knew every raindrop by its name.

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

The fig tree had dropped its fruit all over the ground. Ripe figs lay in the dust, exploded, bloody, as if the sky had rained organs.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

Anaïs Nin

I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ

Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.

Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

William S Burroughs

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

Suicide should come with a warning label: ‘Do not try this alone.’

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

When life sucks, throw yourself into art.

Penelope Lively, How it all Began

When you are able to be with a person and there is no need to talk, something has happened.

Vladimir Nabokov

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

J G Ballard

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.

Anthony Burgess, Homage To QwertYuiop: Essays

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

William S Burroughs

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

I felt so heavy with love. I could feel it packed inside my chest.

Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream

There’s a sorrow and pain in everyone’s life, but every now and then there’s a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed.

Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

What does that mean know me, know me, nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

It’s taken me years of practice to learn how to act natural.

Rupert Thomson, The Insult

There’s love and everybody talks about it, but not all of us come close to it – or, if we do, it’s not in the expected way.

J G Ballard

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

J G Ballard

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

Craig Clevenger, Dermaphoria

The time flies. The time flies feed on rotting clocks.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

We’d be dead. Big deal. Death’s not such a long drop these days. Not for us.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

Ken Kesey, Kesey’s Garage Sale

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