Transgressive Fiction

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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.

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.

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.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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

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.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

We live as we dream–alone….

Lauren Sapala, Between the Shadow and Lo

Better than drugs that don’t last and more solid than gold, vaginas allow women to move about unmolested, in a way that men can only dream of.

Franz Kafka

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

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.

Stephen Graham Jones, After the People Lights Have Gone Off

Each moment, the world washes its hands of you, starts all over again. Easy as that. Wonderful as that.

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.

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.

Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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

Franz Kafka

I am free and that is why I am lost.

Franz Kafka

All language is but a poor translation.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

Love is a kind of killing, Addy,” she says. “Don’t you know that?

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Hate is a lack of imagination.

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.

Blake Butler, There Is No Year

Email servers learned to laugh.

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.

Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

If it hadn’t been what it was, it would’ve been beautiful.

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.

Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

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.

Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

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

Arthur Koestler

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

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

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

Disappear, she says. I love that word.

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.

Will Self, Grey Area

How much more lonely and driven is the serial monogamist than the serial killer?

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.

Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries

they’re fucking up minds they do not own.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

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

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.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

If stealing a few saltshakers was wrong I didn’t want to be right.

Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.

Franz Kafka

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

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

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.

Jim Carroll, The Petting Zoo

Back then, Billy imagined that drops of rain were unanswered prayers falling back to earth.

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.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

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

Megan Abbott

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

Franz Kafka

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

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

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.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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

M Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

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

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

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

Marquis de Sade

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

Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

Franz Kafka

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

Graham Greene

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

A C Weisbecker

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

Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.

Franz Kafka

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

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.

Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories

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

Franz Kafka

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Arthur Koestler

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Jim Carroll

You see, you just don’t knowI’m here to give you my heartAnd you want some fashion show

Arthur Nersesian, Dogrun

Nowadays the standards had plummeted so far that I failed even at being a failure. I silently packed up. Nothing else was left. They had even robbed me of self-pity

Will Self

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

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.

Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

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

Will Christopher Baer, Penny Dreadful

A friend is like anything else. A dog, a plant. You ignore them and they tend to die on you.

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!

Paul Auster, Invisible

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

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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

Blake Butler

black beyond black

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire..I’ve tried. I’ve tried and still I desire, I still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion I can be without illusions..Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved.

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.

Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

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?

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Arthur Koestler, Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967

Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

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

Luke Rhinehart

There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we normally live our lives and we’d sort of like to find out what it is.

Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one’s energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Guy Portman, Charles Middleworth

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

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

It’s far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.

Paul Neilan

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

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

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.

Franz Kafka

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

A weed is a plant out of place.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

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

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.

Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

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

Marquis de Sade

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG

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

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.

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.

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.

Eryk Pruitt, HASHTAG

She was like a redneck Yoko Ono.

David Peace, The Damned Utd

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Albert Camus

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Jack Kerouac

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

Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Mothers are all slightly insane.

Kelly Braffet, Last Seen Leaving

All he would say was that sometimes you have to burn it down and start over.

Iain Banks, Use of Weapons

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

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

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

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar’s vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!

Georges Bataille

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

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

William Golding, Pincher Martin

Worse than madness. Sanity.

Ian McEwan, Atonement

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

D H Lawrence

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.

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.

Georges Bataille

In what will survive meI am in harmonywith my annihilation.

Georges Bataille

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

Will Self

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

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.

Ray Bradbury

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

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

Will Self

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

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

Georges Bataille, Violent Silence

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

Poppy Z Brite

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

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

Nick Cave

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

Nick Cave

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

George Orwell

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

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.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Martin Amis, The Information

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

Albert Camus

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

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.

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.

George Orwell, 1984

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

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.

Allen Ginsberg

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

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.

Aldous Huxley

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

Nick Cave

I’ve always had an obligation to creation, above all.

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

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

Kurt Vonnegut

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.

Poppy Z Brite

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

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Logic is what the devil likes most.

George Orwell, 1984

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

George Orwell

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

Ian McEwan, Atonement

It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

Albert Camus

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

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.

William Golding

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

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.

Allen Ginsberg

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

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.

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.

Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself

Hate can be just as intimate as love.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I am always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.

Allen Ginsberg

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

Richard Bachman, Rage

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

Albert Camus

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

George Orwell

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

George Orwell, 1984

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Aldous Huxley

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

Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears.

George Orwell, 1984

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

Philip K Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

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

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.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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

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’.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

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.

Philip K Dick, VALIS

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

William Golding

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

Matthew Stokoe, High Life

I slept and the night rolled over into day like a dog. Another post-meridian awakening – sunshine on empty bottles, tangled clothes. I dozed while the temperature rose.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.

Martin Amis, Other People

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

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.

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

…I will exile my thoughts if they think of you again, and I will rip my lips out if they say your name once more. Now if you do exist, I will tell you my final word in life or in death, I tell you goodbye.

Tama Janowitz, Slaves of New York

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

Ian McEwan, Saturday

You can tell a lot from a person’s nails. When a life starts to unravel, they’re among the first to go.

Kathy Acker

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

Iain Banks, Against a Dark Background

Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

Ryū Murakami

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

George Orwell, 1984

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

James Joyce

Shut your eyes and see.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

That’s why Twinkle likes the place so much, Scott thought, looking around at the faded wood veneer tables, and the faded souls drinking at them. Misery was soaked through the place like the old beer soaked through its carpets.

Patrick Süskind, The Pigeon

…he came to the conclusion that you cannot depend on people, and that you can live in peace only if you keep them at arm’s length.

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

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

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

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

Charles Bukowski, Factotum

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

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.

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.

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Hunter S Thomson

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

Vladimir Nabokov

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

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.

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

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

Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

Disappear here

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?

Denis Johnson, Already Dead

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

Anaïs Nin

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

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

Anaïs Nin

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

R D Ronald

Nothing says Christmas better than familicide and anaphylactic shock.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

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.

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.

Greg Levin, Sick to Death

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

Henry Miller

To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.

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.

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I don’t want to die without any scars.

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.

Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

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.

Monica Drake, Clown Girl

The only value of wasted time is knowledge.

Hunter S Thomson

Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.

R D Ronald

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

William S Burroughs

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

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.

Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

She looked the way a rose petal looks when you crush it between finger and thumb.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Henry Miller

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

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, Dreams of Leaving

Her smiles were blurred, as if seen from a moving train. Her eyes always creased at the edges by dreams of leaving.

Greg Levin, The Exit Man

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.

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.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

Hubert Selby Jr

Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there’s something inside us that’s so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won’t be able to stand looking at it. But it’s when we’re willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel.

William S Burroughs

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

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

No one ever likes the right person.

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.

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).

Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

Hunter S Thomson

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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

Bret Easton Ellis

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

J G Ballard

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

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.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.

Anthony Burgess, Homage To QwertYuiop: Essays

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.

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.

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

J G Ballard, Crash

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

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

There is no God and we are his prophets.

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.

R D Ronald, The Zombie Room

Decker smiled and shrugged off their laughter. The humour was only barbed if you sat on the outside, and now he was one of them.

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.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

The craggy lines that made up the character in his face now seemed like scars of defeat, inflicted on him over time.

Irvine Welsh, Porno

You can’t lie to your soul.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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

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.

Sylvia Plath

Is there no way out of the mind?

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

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.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

R D Ronald

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

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

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.

J G Ballard, Crash

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

Henry Miller

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Anaïs Nin

Ordinary life does not interest me.

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

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

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.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

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

Henry Miller

What’s a fuck when what I want is love?

Jack Kerouac

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

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

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

Jim Carroll, Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems

I’ll Die For Your Sins If You Live For mine.

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

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Logic is what the devil likes most.

Albert Camus

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

Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

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

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

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

William Golding

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

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.

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.

Iain Banks

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

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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

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.

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.

George Orwell, 1984

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Albert Camus

Live to the point of tears.

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.

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

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

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.

Martin Amis, London Fields

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

Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly

I have seen myself backward.

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.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

Looking at me, you’d never guess I’d killed three people. It isn’t fair.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.

Philip K Dick

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

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.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

Martin Amis, Other People

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

D H Lawrence

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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

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.

Georges Bataille

In what will survive meI am in harmonywith my annihilation.

Ian McEwan, Saturday

You can tell a lot from a person’s nails. When a life starts to unravel, they’re among the first to go.

Albert Camus

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

James Joyce

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

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

When you’re a kid, getting lost isn’t just an event or a situation, it’s like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you’ve done something that can never be undone.

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.

George Orwell, Animal Farm

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

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

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.

Jack Kerouac

Allen Ginsberg

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

George Orwell, 1984

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

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.

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.

William Golding

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

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Mothers are all slightly insane.

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Nick Cave

I’ve always had an obligation to creation, above all.

George Orwell, 1984

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

Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

Nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.

Kathy Acker

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

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.

James Joyce

Shut your eyes and see.

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.

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.

Ryū Murakami

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

Kurt Vonnegut

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

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.

Knut Hamsun

Love is every bit as violent and dangerous as murder.

Richard Bachman, Thinner

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

William Golding, Pincher Martin

Worse than madness. Sanity.

George Orwell, 1984

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

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.

Nick Cave

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

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.

Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

And so it goes…

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.

Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

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

Tama Janowitz, Slaves of New York

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

Kathy Acker

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

Philip K Dick

Georges Bataille, Violent Silence

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

Poppy Z Brite

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

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.

Jim Carroll

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Philip K Dick, VALIS

J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey

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

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.

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.

Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

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

Dennis Cooper, Frisk

Human bodies are such garbage bags.

Albert Camus

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

James Joyce

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

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

We are most artistically caged.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.

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.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

…what they show tells you what they want to hide.

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

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

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.

Hunter S Thomson

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

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

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.

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.

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.

R D Ronald, The Zombie Room

Decker smiled and shrugged off their laughter. The humour was only barbed if you sat on the outside, and now he was one of them.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

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

Charles Bukowski, Post Office

I wanted the whole world or nothing.

J G Ballard

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

Craig Clevenger, Dermaphoria

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

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.

Edit | Delete J G Ballard, The Day of Creation

Sooner or later, everything turns into television.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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

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.

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.

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.

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

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

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.

Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity

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

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

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

William S Burroughs

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

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.

William S Burroughs

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

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

Denis Johnson

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.

J G Ballard, Crash

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

R D Ronald

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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.

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.

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.

Irvine Welsh, Porno

You can’t lie to your soul.

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

Rupert Thomson, Dreams of Leaving

Her smiles were blurred, as if seen from a moving train. Her eyes always creased at the edges by dreams of leaving.

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.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

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

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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

William S Burroughs, Naked Lunch

You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

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.

Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

Denis Johnson, Already Dead

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

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.

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.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

I knew every raindrop by its name.

Charles Bukowski

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

William S Burroughs

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on. A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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

Anaïs Nin

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

J G Ballard, Running Wild

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

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.

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.

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.

R D Ronald

Nothing says Christmas better than familicide and anaphylactic shock.

Charles Bukowski, Barfly

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

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

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.

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.

Henry Miller

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

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

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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

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.

Douglas Coupland

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

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.

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?

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.

Anaïs Nin

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

Charles Bukowski

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

Ken Kesey, Kesey’s Garage Sale

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook

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

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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

R D Ronald, The Elephant Tree

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.

Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

Disappear here

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

Charles Bukowski

Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.

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).

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.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.

Patrick Süskind, The Pigeon

…he came to the conclusion that you cannot depend on people, and that you can live in peace only if you keep them at arm’s length.

Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

Greg Levin, In Wolves Clothing

In this job, you learn to ignore the urge to comfort those you’re protecting.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

J G Ballard

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

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.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

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