“—Music hurts me. I don’t know whether I truly love it. It finds me wherever it happens to. I don’t go looking for it. I let it caress me. But these caresses are injurious. How should I say it? Music is a weeping in melodies, a remembrance in notes, a painting in sounds. I can’t rightly say. Just so no one takes my statements about art up there too seriously. They’re certain to miss the mark somewhat as not a single note has yet struck me today. There’s something missing when I don’t hear music, and when I do, then there’s really something missing. That’s the best I can say about music.”

(Robert Walser, from “Music”, from Fritz Kocher’s Essays, trans. Susan Bernofsky, p. 10 in Masquerade and Other Stories.)

“Simon was twenty years old when it occurred to him one evening as he lay in the soft, green moss beside the road that, just as he was, he could wander out into the world and become a page boy.”

(Robert Walser, from “Simon: a love story”, trans. Susan Bernofsky, p. 15 in Masquerade and Other Stories.)

“To take it further, I would not recommend listening to Beatles records to anyone. Bands that take their musical influence from The Beatles have a tendency to be the most boring of any particular era, like ELO or Oasis. To get what The Beatles had to offer the world, you had to experience it as it unfolded at the time. And that is the way it should be. All art and all music should be of the moment and experienced in the moment.”

(Bill Drummond, 17, p. 168.)

“On the stage, we see the story of DOL, a little girl of the zoo. The zoo is populated with the huge silhouettes of countless exotic beast. The bars of the zoo are semi-transparent tyger stripes.

DOL lives with her zookeeper father, DELMAS. Instead of working like a good zookeeper should, DELMAS has receded into a world of his own. His thoughts are so distant as to appear absent.

DOL pleads with her father to return to her world – the world of tending beasts in the here and now.

DELMAS robotically lifts up an old animal collar from some straw. Something black and oily drips from the collar onto his hands. This goo strangely galvanizes the entranced DELMAS; he abandons his daughter to rush off to a meat-lined cottage.”

(Film treatment of Maldoror: Tygers p. 169 in Guy Maddin’s From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings.)

“PETER: You mustn’t touch me.
WENDY: Why?
PETER: No one must ever touch me.
WENDY: Why?
PETER: I don’t know.
(He is never touched by anyone in the play.)”

(J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, 1904.)

“When asked by President Kennedy what she does all day, she admits she is ‘stumped’. A disarmingly simple soul – ‘I now prefer horse shows to lovers & I’ve never liked drink’ – the Duchess is at her best on varieties of gooseberry and rare breeds of cattle.”

(Kate McLoughlin, review of In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, ed. Charlotte Mosley, p. 26 of the 28 November 2008 edition of the Times Literary Supplement.)

“Before Archimboldi left, after they’d had a cup of tea, the man who rented him the typewriter said:

‘Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.’ ”

(Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer, p. 790.)

“Amalfitano had some rather idiosyncratic ideas about jet lag. They weren’t constant, so it might be an exaggeration to call them ideas. They were feelings. Make-believe ideas. As if he were looking out the window and forcing himself to see an extraterrestrial landscape. He believed (or liked to think he believed) that when a person was in Barcelona, the people living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City didn’t exist. The time difference only masked their nonexistence. And so if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn’t exist or hadn’t yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn’t traveled. This was something he’d probably read in some science fiction novel or story and that he’d forgotten having read.”

(Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer, p. 189.)

“Trivial details illuminate the course of control through the distributing agencies. Forty years ago you could have records sent home to you on approval, in line with the customs of a liberalism which formally, at least, respected the customer’s taste. Today you find the more expensive albums citing copyright laws and the like in order to keep the stores from furnishing them on approval: ‘Sales conditions for Germany: Rerecording our records as well as recording broadcast of our records on tape or wire, even for private use, is forbidden. To avoid rerecordings without permission, dealers are not allowed to loan, rent, or furnish records on approval.’ The possibility of abuses cannot even be denied; the worst can now almost always cite irrefutable reasons – they are the medium in which evil becomes reality. In any case the pig must be bought in a poke, for listening to records in the poorly insulated cells of stores is a farce. Complementing it is the maxim that the customer is king because he can enjoy Bruckner’s entire Seventh Symphony in the privacy of his home. Whether such tendencies will change with market conditions remains to be seen.”

(Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962), p. 201.)

“When I flew in to read at Brown, we first of all marched around the parking lot, reviewing the literary situation.”

(Paul West, “John Hawkes”, p. 13 in Sheer Fiction, Vol. IV.)