“As writers who follow the call of the vocation and not the pursuit of wealth, our fate is a continuous search for pretexts to postpone the moment of putting the pen to paper.”
(Adolfo Bioy Casares & Silvina Ocampo, Where There’s Love, There’s Hate, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine & Jessica Ernst Powell, p. 90.)
“ ‘You don’t gave to watch anything close anymore,’ he tells Dr. Onarga, at one appointment, “’cause it’ll always be repeated.’ ”
(Charles Newman, White Jazz (1984), p. 21.)
“ ‘. . . for even in the last century, realism made such strides that we can no longer endure it! I’ve even heard that a certain Courbet, at one of his last exhibitions, showed himself, face to the wall, in the performance of one of the most hygienic but least elegant actions of life! Enough to scare away Zeuxis’s birds!’ ”
(Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863), trans. Richard Howard.)
“Some of the greatest paintings in the world are by Velaquez. But you can’t see them the way you’d like to, because it’s the goddamn King of Spain.”
(William Gass, interviewed by Greg Gerke, at Tin House.)
“ ‘Those are the frog-readers. They make up the vast majority of human readers, and yet I only discovered their existence quite late in life. I am so terribly naïve. I thought that everyone read the way I do. For I read the way I ear: that means not only do I need to read, but also, and above all, that reading becomes one of my components and modifies them all. You are not the same person depending on whether you have eaten blood pudding or caviar; nor are you the same person depending on whether you have just read Kant (God help us) or Queneau. Well, when I say “you,” I should say “I myself and a few others,” because the majority of people emerge from reading Proust or Simenon in an identical state: they have neither lost a fraction of what they were nor gained a single additional fraction. They have read, that’s all: in the best-case scenario, they know “what it’s all about.” And I’m not exaggerating. How often have I asked intelligent people, “Did this book change you?” And they look at me, their eyes wide, as if to say, “Why should a book change me?” ’ ”
(Amélie Nothomb, Hygiene and the Assassin, trans. Alison Anderson, p. 54. As printed, the last line reads “Why should a book to change me?”)
“ ‘. . . . The salad days of consumer-motivation research, when the great theorist Ernest Dichter, in the introduction to his seminal work The Strategy of Desire, could pose the question of whether or not it was ethical to wade into the human mind and implant never-before existent desires for unneeded products – only to respond wholeheartedly in the affirmative by wrapping himself in the flag.
‘In the Soviet Union, Dichter argued, advertising was every bit as prevalent as it was in America. The only difference was that the Soviets’ advertising campaigns were run by the government and called propaganda, whereas ours were called marketing and were run by private business. The purpose of propaganda, he went on to say, was to manipulate people into believing that all was as it should be; that the citizens had everything they could want; that they lived in a great country founded upon a great ideal; that their work was important; that their lives were meaningful. In short, propaganda strove to create contentment. The purpose of American-styel marketing, in contrast, was precisely the opposite. It existed to create discontent, to ensure that citizens were never happy with their lot, inciting them to crave more money, more property, newer cars, better clothing, better bodies, younger and more beautiful spouses. Thanks to marketing, American citizens were perpetually unsatisfied, goaded ever onward, ever forward, generating the American advantage, the drive that ensured progress, technological innovation, and a fully stimulated economy.’ ”
(Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl, pp. 136–7.)
“To learn that the government – using information that the law now requires be recorded on tape and stored indefinitely by banks, the telephone company, airlines, credit-card companies – can know more about me (my more sociable activities, anyway) than I do myself. If necessary, I could list most of the plane trips I’ve taken; and my old checkbook stubs are in a drawer – somewhere. But I don’t remember whom I telephoned exactly four months ago at 11 a.m., and never will. I don’t think it was Julia.”
(Susan Sontag, “Debriefing,” p. 46 in I, etcetera.)
“From this point of view, mannerism is the first modern style, the first which is concerned with a cultural problem and which regards the relationship between tradition and innovation as a problem to be solved by rational means. Tradition is here nothing but a bulwark against the all too violently approaching storms of the unfamiliar, an element which is felt to be a principle of life but also of destruction. It is impossible to understand mannerism if one does not grasp the fact that its imitation of classical models is an escape from the threatening chaos, and that the subjective overstraining of its forms is the expression of the fear that form might fail in the struggle with life and art fade into soulless beauty.”
(Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, trans. Stanley Godman, vol. 2, pp. 100–1.)
“So it comes about that the effect of such a building is not merely not impaired when it is left uncompleted; its appeal and its power are actually increased. The inconclusiveness of the forms, which is characteristic of every dynamic style, gives emphasis to one’s impression of endless, restless movement for which any stationary equilibrium is merely provisional. The modern preference for the unfinished, the sketchy, and the fragmentary has its origin here. Since Gothic days all great art, with the exception of a few short-lived classicist movements, has something fragmentary about it, an inward or outward incompleteness, an unwillingness, whether conscious or unconscious, to utter the last word. There is always something left over for the spectator or the reader to complete. The modern artist shrinks from the last word, because he feels the inadequacy of all words – a feeling which we may say was never experienced by man before Gothic times.”
(Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, trans. Stanley Godman, vol. 1, pp. 242–3.)
“Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day.
The woman had to skewer the hole in the kitchen sink, when it was blocked up.
The man went to the pub every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The other nights he mended his broken bicycle, did the pool coupons, and longed for money and power.
The woman read love stories and longed for things to be different.
The children fought and yelled and played and had scabs on their knees.
In the end they all died.”
(Elizabeth Smart, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals, p. 81.)