298 quotes found
"Mostly, you write a script and someone’s gonna rewrite you. They get hundreds of—not hundred but they get ten writers to write something. If you have a big budget, you can go and get a lot of people to write on script .... I just actually heard that somebody said, 'Well, your screenplay got bought and now someone like Carrie Fisher will come in and rewrite you.' And I feel terrible, you know, because that’s not what I mean to do. My idea was never to raid something and trash it, you know. ‘Cause that – that’s more work for me!"
"I have gone to the set and you’re kind of around in this—it’s kind of combat writing when you do rewriting and stuff, and I feel like it’s a kind of ambulance chasing. Recently, I did this kind of a (laughing) where you go, “Oh, my God, it’s bleeding from the second act. Quick! Quick! Give me a suture! No, give me the paddles! This is the third act that’s having a heart attack!! The star is coming! The star is coming!" And it's this incredibly intense process!"
"I slept with some nerd. I hope it was George [Lucas]. I took too many drugs to remember."
"I Googled myself without lubricant. I don't recommend it."
"Things are getting worse faster than I can lower my standards."
"I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art."
"Instant gratification takes too long."
"That's the way it works in movies," said Suzanne. "Something happens that has an impact on someone's life, and based on that impact, his life shifts course. Well, that's not how it happens in life. Something has an impact on you, and then your life stays the same, and you think, 'Well, what about the impact?' You have epiphanies all the time. They just don't have any effect."
"I love what speed and coke do to my weight. It's unnatural, I know. I could just exercise. ..."
"I have to start by telling you that my entire existence can be summed up in one phrase. And that is: If my life wasn't funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable."
"It was one movie [[Star Wars (film)|[Star Wars]]]. It wasn't supposed to do what it did—nothing was supposed to do that. Nothing ever had. Movies were meant to stay on the screen, flat and large and colorful, gathering you up into their sweep of story, carrying you rollicking along to the end, then releasing you back into your unchanged life. But this movie misbehaved. It leaked out of the theater, poured off the screen, affected a lot of people so deeply that they required endless talismans and artifacts to stay connected to it."
"Ms. Fisher established Princess Leia as a damsel who could very much deal with her own distress, whether facing down the villainy of the dreaded Darth Vader or the romantic interests of the roguish smuggler Han Solo. ... Winning the admiration of countless fans, Ms. Fisher never played Leia as helpless. She had the toughness to escape the clutches of the monstrous gangster Jabba the Hutt and the tenderness to tell Han Solo, as he is about to be frozen in carbonite, “I love you.”"
"The wind shows us how close to the edge we are"
"Writers are always selling somebody out."
"Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price."
"The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs."
"Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?"
"One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me."
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image."
"Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power."
"In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space."
"Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned."
"When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges."
"Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout."
"Her nonfiction is so compelling. She finds exactly the right words that she needs to establish setting and character and not one word more."
"...anxiety was her schtick. She applies her anxiety to everything. And when she’s got it in balance it's brilliant. And when she doesn’t, when her anxiety becomes the subject, it’s lousy."
"("Who are some of the women writers around who are not feminists, who are simply writers, or even doing a disservice to the feminist cause?") I think an example would be Joan Didion. First, I have to say I dislike the word cause. I think she does a disservice to the feminist cause, to any progressive cause, and also to the clarity of language. I've read a couple of her books. I don't know anything about her except she's from California. Well, I mean, so is Tillie. Just goes to show. I think her style is very... sentimental really. And indirect and opaque."
"with Didion I really just feel moral, political, stylistic differences. People think she's such a great stylist, but I don't. I think she's sentimental. I mean, she doesn't overwrite. She doesn't do that at all. I will say that for her. But I don't like her attitude towards people, you know. I don't think she really illuminates them but darkens them so that we see them less by the time we're through. Maybe in the beginning we see them a little bit but by the end we really don't see them. And I don't think she wants us to. And I think that's a political thing."
"All things lie dark in possibility."
"Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play."
"All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy."
"I was a little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to be: the victim of the world."
"He was just a young man who'd come to town on a donkey, bored to death or something, who'd taken advantage of the chance to be entertained by a small-town kid who was bored to death, too. That's the only way I could figure it out without accepting the general theory that he was crazy."
"Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines."
"The race was over. I was last, by ten yards. Without the slightest hesitation I protested and challenged the runners to another race, same distance, back. They refused to consider my proposal, which proved, I knew, that they were afraid to race me. I told them they knew very well I could beat them."
"There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind."
"It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear."
"I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little."
"One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater."
"What the hell are they all looking for? A way out. A way to the right way out. A way to leave. A way to go. A way to have had it, to have had enough of it, to be done with it. A decent way to give it all over to the giver of it all."
"What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America."
"I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich."
"The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy — the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops."
"Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small. The priest begs God for grace, and the king begs something for something. Sometimes he begs the people for loyalty, sometimes he begs God to forgive him. No man in the world can have endured ten years without having begged God to forgive him."
"I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living."
"One of us is obviously mistaken."
"I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?"
"When I was fifteen and had quit school forever, I went to work in a vineyard near Sanger with a number of Mexicans, one of whom was only a year or two older than myself, an earnest boy named Felipe. One gray, dismal, cold, dreary day in January, while we were pruning muscat vines, I said to this boy, simply in order to be talking, "If you had your wish, Felipe, what would you want to be? A doctor, a farmer, a singer, a painter, a matador, or what?" Felipe thought a minute, and then he said, "Passenger." This was exciting to hear, and definitely something to talk about at some length, which we did. He wanted to be a passenger on anything that was going anywhere, but most of all on a ship."
"Whoever the kid had been, whoever had the grand attitude, has finally heeded the admonishment of parents, teachers, governments, religions, and the law: "You just change your attitude now please, young man." This transformation in kids — from flashing dragonflies, so to say, to sticky water-surface worms slowly slipping downstream — is noticed with pride by society and with mortification by God, which is a fantastic way of saying I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market."
"The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?"
"A neighborhood has a kind of mystical identity which one scarcely suspects let alone notices while one is living there, for living uses up all of a man's time and attention. But in retrospect sooner or later a man remembers an old neighborhood and suddenly notices that there was something fantastic about the place."
"Chance meetings with living saints and sons of bitches goes on and on."
"My daughter, before she was sixteen, and especially before she was six, absolutely stunned me every day by the simple beauty and sweetness of her truth."
"Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it."
"Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?"
"The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited."
"Standing at the edge of our city, a man could feel that we had made this place of streets and dwellings in the stillness of the desert, and that we had done a brave thing... Or a man could feel that we had made this city in the desert and that it was a fake thing and that our lives were empty lives, and that we were the contemporaries of the jack rabbits."
"I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being."
"Art is what is irresistible."
"The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."
"Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed objectively for strength to make the flight with grace."
"Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was still all things at once: the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect."
"If you can't write a decent short story because of the cold, write something else. Write anything. Write a long letter to somebody."
"What I intended to do was to burn a half dozen of my books and keep warm, so that I could write my story, but when I looked around for titles to burn, I couldn't find any."
"There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones."
"This was such bad writing that it was good."
"It seemed to me that I had no right to burn a book I hadn't even read."
"I couldn't understand the language, I couldn't understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire."
"The only thing I can talk about is the cold because it is the only thing going on today."
"A man must pretend not to be a writer."
"I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language what they already know."
"If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man."
"This is a big statement and it sounds a little precious. Generally a man is ashamed to make such a statement. He is afraid sophisticated people will laugh at him. But I don't mind. I'm asking sophisticated people to laugh. That is what sophistication is for."
"I do not believe in races. I do not believe in governments."
"I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth."
"Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength."
"If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language."
"This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said."
"It is the heart of man that I am trying to imply in this work."
"I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive."
"I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one man at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each man involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all the men who survived the war, including myself, I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers. There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign."
"Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends."
"Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else."
"I began to visit Armenia as soon as I had earned the necessary money."
"I love Armenian people — all of them. I love them because they are a part of the enormous human race, which of course I find simultaneously beautiful and vulnerable."
"It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give."
"There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human race about its future."
"There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth."
"A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography."
"I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose history is ended, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, whose literature is unread, whose music is unheard, whose prayers are no longer uttered. Go ahead, destroy this race. Let us say that it is again 1915. There is war in the world. Destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their houses and their churches. See if they will not live again. See if they will not laugh again. See if the race will not live again when two of them meet in a beer parlor, twenty years later, and laugh, and speak in their tongue. Go ahead, see if you can do anything about it. See if you can stop them from mocking the big ideas of the world, you sons of bitches, a couple of Armenians talking in the world, go ahead and try to destroy them."
"I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death."
"I have been to the place, Armenia. There is no nation there, but that is all the better. But I have been to that place, and I know this: that there is no nation in the world, no England and France and Italy, and no nation whatsoever."
"My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there?"
"My uncle jumped up from the desk, loving him more than he loved any other man in the world, and through him loving the lost nation, the multitude dead, and the multitude living in every alien corner of the world."
"When Andranik went away... I saw that tears were in his eyes and his mouth was twisting with agony like the mouth of a small boy who is in great pain but will not let himself cry."
"It's all over. We can begin to forget Armenia now. Andranik is dead. The nation is lost. I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it."
"You write a hit play the same way you write a flop."
"The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness."
"I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things."
"I care so much about everything that I care about nothing."
"The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business."
"My superficial manners stink and my profound manners are almost as bad."
"All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too."
"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know."
"The business of polishing my shoes satisfies my soul."
"The purpose of my life is to put off dying as long as possible."
"The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness."
"Poetry must be read to be poetry. It may be that one reader is all that I deserve. If this is so, I want that reader to be you."
"I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful."
"In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today."
"I am deeply opposed to violence in all its forms, and yet I myself am violent in spirit, in my quarrel with the unbeatable: myself, my daemon, God, the human race, the world, time, pain, disorder, disgrace and death."
"I have made a fiasco of my life, but I have had the right material to work with."
"Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won't kill anything. There will always be poets in the world."
"I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant."
"I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me."
"There is only good and bad art."
"Nothing has ever been more sure-fire than truth and integrity."
"I believe in my work and am eager for others to know about it."
"It is better to be a good human being than to be a bad one. It is just naturally better."
"The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith."
"Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it."
"In the time of your life, live — so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed. Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart. Be the inferior of no man, nor of any man be the superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle, but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret. In the time of your life, live — so that in the wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it."
"A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values."
"Don't forget that some things count more than other things."
"Each person belongs to the environment, in his own person, as himself."
"Art can no longer afford to be contemptuous of politics, and it appears to be time politics took a little instruction from art."
"The weakness of art is that great poems do not ennoble politics, as they certainly should, and the trouble with politics is that they inspire poets only to mockery and scorn."
"Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art an other."
"Wars, for us, are either inevitable, or created. Whatever they are, they should not wholly vitiate art. What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men."
"Art and religion would not be able to stop the war any more than they would be able to stop tomorrow."
"My work has always been the product of my time."
"One day, back there in the good old days when I was nine and the world was full of every kind of magnificence, and life was still a delightful and mysterious dream, my cousin Mourad, who was considered crazy by everybody who knew him except me, came to my house at four in the morning and woke me up by tapping on the window of my room. "Aram," he said. I jumped out of bed and looked out the window. I couldn't believe what I saw. It wasn't morning yet, but it was summer and with daybreak not many minutes around the corner of the world it was light enough for me to know I wasn't dreaming. My cousin Mourad was sitting on a beautiful white horse."
"We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in."
"Now, having a play on the same bill with a play by the one and only, the good and great, the impish and noble, the man and superman, George Bernard Shaw, is for me an honor, and I think a most fitting thing."
"I have long known of Mr. Shaw, read his plays and prefaces, and loved him. I admire heroic effort. Accomplishment I love. What I am about to say is no invention, and I am putting it down for whatever it may be worth to the historian of literature and for the student of influences of men on men, and because it is true and must therefore be made known. As a boy, charging pell-mell through literature, reading everything I could lay hands on in the Public Library of Fresno, I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful — especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken — but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned."
"I myself, as a person, have been influenced by many writers and many things, and my writing has felt the impact of the writing of many writers, some relatively unknown and unimportant, some downright bad. But probably the greatest influence of them all when an influence is most effective — when the man being influenced is nowhere near being solid in his own right — has been the influence of the great tall man with the white beard, the lively eyes, the swift wit and the impish chuckle."
"I have read Schopenhauer at the age of twelve with no bewilderment and no contempt of his contempt for the world and its strange inhabitants, and no contempt for the strange inhabitant himself."
"I have read books about the behavior of mobs — The Mob by Le Bon, if I remember rightly, was one — about the crime in children, and the genius in them, about the greatest bodies of things, and about the littlest of them. I have been fascinated by it all, grateful for it all, grateful for the sheer majesty of the existence of ideas, stories, fables, and paper and ink and print and books to hold them all together for a man to take aside and examine alone. But the man I liked most and the man who seemed to remind me of myself — of what I really was and would surely become — was George Bernard Shaw."
"When, at the age of eighteen, I was the manager of the Postal Telegraph office at 21 Taylor Street in San Francisco, I remember having been asked by the clerk there, a man named Clifford, who the hell I thought I was. And I remember replying very simply and earnestly somewhat as follows: If you have ever heard of George Bernard Shaw, if you have ever read his plays or prefaces, you will know what I mean when I tell you that I am that man by another name. Who is he? I remember the clerk asking. George Bernard Shaw, I replied, is the tonic of the Christian peoples of the world. He is health, wisdom, and comedy, and that's what I am too. How do you figure? The clerk said. Don't bother me, I said. I'm the night manager of this office and when I tell you something it's final."
"Now, if Mr. Shaw and Mr. Saroyan are poles apart, no comparison between the two, one great and the other nothing, one a genius and the other a charlatan, let me repeat that if you must know which writer has influenced my writing when influences are real and for all I know enduring, then that writer has been George Bernard Shaw. I shall in my own day influence a young writer or two somewhere or other, and no one need worry about that. Young Shaw, hello out there."
"Their singing wasn't particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all."
"Mrs. Sandoval," Homer said swiftly, "your son is dead. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it wasn't your son. Maybe it was somebody else. The telegram says it was Juan Domingo. But maybe the telegram is wrong."
"Everything is changed — for you. But it is still the same, too. The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the whole world has always been full of that loneliness. The loneliness does not come from the War. The War did not make it. It was the loneliness that made the War."
"You must remember always to give, of everything you have. You must give foolishly even. You must be extravagant. You must give to all who come into your life. Then nothing and no one shall have power to cheat you of anything, for if you give to a thief, he cannot steal from you, and he himself is then no longer a thief. And the more you give, the more you will have to give."
"Everything alive is part of each of us, and many things which do not move as we move are part of us. The sun is part of us, the earth, the sky, the stars, the rivers, and the oceans. All things are part of us, and we have come here to enjoy them and to thank God for them."
"Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but every life shall one day end. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us. His body can be taken, but not him. You shall know your father better as you grow and know yourself better. He is not dead, because you are alive. Time and accident, illness and weariness took his body, but already you have given it back to him, younger and more eager than ever. I don't expect you to understand anything I'm telling you. But I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life."
"How did roses ever happen?"
"How did money ever happen? What's it mean? What's it for?"
"You act as if you know more than I'll ever know, but I've forgotten more than you'll ever know. You're snobs, too. Every man I've ever met has been a snob. You don't have to be a snob, too, do you? Please sign this piece of paper, so I can be a member of the public library and read books and find out about people. I don't want to hate you, I just can't help it."
"He knew the truth and was looking for something better."
"There's a pretty woman for ever lucky man in the world: every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?"
"Jim Dandy waves his stick over and around about the rock in a meaningless-meaningful way."
"I had three secrets and sold them all."
"Be, beget, begone."
"We know more than we need to know."
"Somewhere among every man's ancestors is a prince or a lord, a priest or a saint, and don't forget it. Wake up! Inherit the wealth of your ancestors!.. Stop living like a mouse, live like the rich people do."
"One nickel, one secret. No exchanges, no refunds."
"I was an old man by the time I took that walk to the Public Library in San Francisco, because the years between birth and twenty are the years in which the soul travels farthest and swiftest."
"Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind."
"My illness is life itself."
"Illness must be considered to be as natural as health."
"Illness is essentially discomfort, and it is not easy for anybody to be comfortable all the time... in his body, in his work, in his house, or in his soul."
"I had in my soul the greatest truths to tell, but when I came to the work of telling them I couldn't do it."
"I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it."
"A man cannot write a poem or a story that will transform the whole nature of man, his reality and his truth, making them greater and nobler."
"The streets made me, and the streets stink, but I love them, for I was born in them out of flesh and I was born in them out of spirit."
"I loved the theaters, and even though I was hungry, I never spent money for food."
"The world was my home and I was glad to be in it."
"I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness."
"The order I found was the order of disorder."
"What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace."
"My writing is careless, but all through it is something that is good, that is mine alone, that no other writer could ever achieve."
"Boredom was the plague of my childhood. While I was at the orphanage, the boredom came from being in a place I did not wish to be. I was bored. I was bored the entire four years I was there."
"Many friendships are swift and accidental, the result of a chance meeting, followed by a permanent separation."
"Nobody seemed to be interested in anything except making money."
"In the most commonplace, tiresome, ridiculous, malicious, coarse, crude, or even crooked people or events I had to seek out rare things, good things, comic things, and I did so."
"Love of the streets is the love out of which I see deeply I love God, how near I come to the truth."
"The end of life evokes the errors of it, and a fellow wishes he had known better."
"A writer wants what he has to say to be heard again and again. He wants it to be heard after he is dead."
"At his best, things do not happen to the artist; he happens to them."
"Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive."
"The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art — that is, the meaningful-real."
"In order to write all a man needs is paper and a pencil. Furthermore, when a thing has been written, it is written forever. When it is printed, nothing can stop it from being printed again and again if the thing wants to be printed again and again. I must therefore be a writer."
"I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from myself, from my family, my fellow man, my country, my world, my time, and my culture. I am not estranged from God, although I am a disbeliever in everything about God excepting God indefinable, inaccessible, inside all and careless of all."
"Three times in my life I have been captured: by the orphanage, by school, and by the Army. I was four years in the orphanage, seven or eight in school, and three in the Army. Each seemed forever, though. But I'm mistaken. The fact is I was captured only once, when I was born, only that capture is also setting free, which is what this is actually all about. The free prisoner."
"I was never interested in the obvious, or in the details one takes for granted, and everybody seemed to be addicted to the obvious, being astonished by it, and forever harping about the details which I had long ago weighted, measured, and discarded as irrelevant and useless. If you can measure it, don't. If you can weigh it, it isn't worth the bother. It isn't what you're after. It isn't going to get it. My wisdom was visual and as swift as vision. I looked, I saw, I understood, I felt, "That's that, where do we go from here?" ."
"In those days, there was something more to the world than there is now. Well, my kids were little, let's put it that way, and of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again."
"I believed from the beginning of remembered experience that I was somebody with an incalculable potential for enlargement, somebody who both knew and could find out, upon whom demands could be made with the expectation of having them fulfilled. I felt at the same time, and pretty much constantly, that I was nothing in relation to Enormity, the Unknown, and the Unknowable. I was too vulnerable, too lacking in power, a thing of subtle reality, liable to be blown away without a moment's warning, a migrant with no meaning, no guide, no counsel, an entity in continuous transition, a growing thing whose stages of growth always went unnoticed, a fluid and flawed thing. Thus, there could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all. I did frequently rejoice in the recognition, but I may have gotten that from some of the Protestant hymns I had heard, and knew, and had sung, such as Joy to the World. The simple fact was that if the song wasn't about me, I couldn't see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too."
"Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world."
"I liked Charentz straight off, but more important than this was the feeling that I had that he was a truly great man. Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met. Charentz seemed great to me, I think, because he was made of a mixture of proud virtues and amusing flaws. On the one hand, his independence of spirit was balanced by a humorous worldliness, his acute intelligence by a curiosity that frequently made him seem naive, his profoundly gentle manners by a kind of mocking mischievousness which might easily be mistaken for rudeness. But he was never rude, he was witty, and the purpose of his wit was to keep himself from the terrible condition of pomposity."
"He paints for the blind, and we are the blind, and he lets us see for sure what we saw long ago but weren't sure we saw. He paints for the dead, to remind us that — great good God, think of it — we're alive, and on our way to weather, from the sea to the hot interior, to watermelon there, a bird at night chasing a child past flowering cactus, a building on fire, barking dogs, and guitar-players not playing at eight o'clock, every picture saying, "Did you live, man? Were you alive back there for a little while? Good for you, good for you, and wasn't it hot, though? Wasn't it great when it was hot, though?""
"If the great one found out about my fight with Death, and came to be near me, what good things we might all expect from being in the world. and then around daybreak I knew I had come through, and now at last fell into real sleep — alone, and proud, and alive — now more alive than ever."
"I was four years old, and had long since reasoned that it was folly to expect the big things from people. It was enough to get the little things. The biggest thing, of course, was love, the nearness of somebody you love when you need somebody to be near."
"Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student."
"I have always been a laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres… I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laughter to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed."
"I had long known that there was something about me that was either violent or frightening for some reason. In certain three-sided clothing store images I had for some years come upon myself, with shock and disbelief, regret, and shame, disappointment and despair, for I am indeed clearly violent, mad, and ugly, all because of intensity of some kind, a tension, an obsession with getting everything that there was to be got, a passion, an insanity."
"The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better."
"Jesus never said anything about absurdity, and he never indicated for one flash of time that he was aware of the preposterousness of his theory about himself. And he didn't even try to make the theory understandable in terms of the reality and experience of the rest of us. For if everybody else is also not what Jesus said he was, what good is what he said?"
"The boy on the Oakland porch goes to sleep upon the universe of ice and wakes up and remembers the death of his father and mother, and sees the sun."
"I have been vitally aware of the Law of Opposites, and this awareness has kept me reasonably serene... the drama of life... the play of truth. the quarrel of fools and frauds, male and female, the classic and the romantic, the disciplined and the free... the comic and the tragic contrasting of the opposites in all areas of possibility and on and on and on."
"My work is writing, but my real work is being."
"To remember something or to invent something, it comes to the same thing."
"I did my best, and let me urge you to do your best, too. Isn't it the least we can do for one another?"
"Going around the world on a bicycle is no longer enough -- the daredevil has got to go around the moon on a Pogo stick with one arm tied behind him if he wants to get his picture in the paper."
"I was afraid I might actually know him, might have known him, one of perhaps three hundred Fresno boys I had known thirty years ago, because if I *did* know him, I would have to make something of it, and this just wasn't the time for it."
"Before the cat tastes the fish, his whiskers must feel the head."
"A prudent man does not open an umbrella for one drop of rain."
"The bicycle is a city thing, virtually useless anywhere excepting on a pavement or hard surface of some kind. Without the road it would never have been invented. It is a little mad, both in design and purpose. Two wheels held together in a frame, with a simple mechanical system enabling a forward movement for one person."
"Cowards are the nicest people, the most interesting, the gentlest, the most refined, the least likely to commit crimes."
"Cowards are nice, they're interesting, they're gentle, they wouldn't think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They're very brave."
"'Aram Sevavor, I came for advice about a private matter. I came all the way from my house on L Street to your house on Van Ness Avenue, past the place where they have those red fire engines, all the way up Eye Street, where the police have their building, all the way up Forthcamp Avenue, I came, Aram Sevavor, one foot after the other, from my house to your house, I came, and now I go, I go all the way back, Aram Sevavor, because I can't remember the question I came to ask.'"
"In the tradition of popular oratory, Trash [a nickname] started a talk at random, moved confidently ahead in no particular direction, and, although he spoke very clearly, said nothing."
"I say the time is ripe for a William Saroyan revival... Bill Saroyan, that rollicking elf of an author who knew well of irony and compassion and laughter, wrote first-class original works for television, and the adaptations of his plays invariably hit the mark. I am thinking now in particular of the Playhouse 90 production of "The Time of Your Life." In it Jackie Gleason delivered a tremendous portrayal as Joe the philosopher who had this wistful greeting for everyone who entered the bar: "What's the dream?" ... In one of his last essays you may find a perceptive line that tells of the Saroyan working philosophy: "The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it." ... He looked, William Saroyan, exactly the way you would expect him to look. He had a huge mustache and a booming voice and a commanding presence. He was exuberant. He was mischievous. He was fun. … How he could make the English language soar! His words danced. This was writing that was never inhabited by wallflowers. This was Bill Saroyan."
"He is one of the most underrated writers of the century. He takes his place naturally alongside Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner."
"Saroyan's output from 1934 to 1940 established his reputation. What enthralled critics and readers was the brashness and certainty of his daring: Beginning with his first collection of linked short stories — written in 30 days, a story each day — and mailed off to Whit Burnett at Story Magazine. This was a new, fresh, exuberant kind of writing, intensely personal, prose poems which departed from customary narrative structures and sauntered elliptically with the awe of a young man fully realizing the most self-evident of truths: himself, alive upon the earth. … My recollection of those first Saroyan stories is typical: watching his language mesh the spiritual hunger and the actual physical hunger of the penniless main character was to be in the presence of a breathtaking act of creation. Hope and possibility were mandatory components to the human comedy as Saroyan viewed it. Accepting madness as the only constant in the universe never precluded joy and laughter. Cynicism had no place in the way one approached each day. Whimsy, compassion, a ready smile and the gift of interior and exterior motion were to be the tools."
"I'm reminded of the incident in the early 1950s when a suddenly-timorous Jack Kerouac reportedly met Saroyan and exclaimed, "So you're the man who wrote 'The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse.' I've never forgotten that story!" That meeting, one could suggest, was inevitable. All the ingredients the Beats would incorporate into their canon had a germinal precedent in Saroyan's work: Rexroth's and Ferlinghetti's recognition of San Francisco's cultural civility and bohemian possibilities; Kerouac's interior monologues, frenzied energy and catch-all structureless narratives; and the Beat poets' looking toward the collected wisdom of Asia and its intermixed infusion of philosophical acceptance, respect for the earth and simplicity of style. … It is difficult to conceive of the hippie phenomenon coming about without a Saroyan-like oeuvre as precursor … what Saroyan added to the crucible of the writer defining his place upon the landscape was a remarkable insight into the creative process: Always walking the streets as if for the first time, noting nothing as insignificant and everything as meaningless, relishing the feel of the typewriter keyboard, crafting his words and himself as both a defiant and an absurd cackle at the universe."
"One need not have been raised in Fresno to appreciate Saroyan, though I suppose it helps. Certainly he, better than anybody, captured the valley's strange texture: the mishmash landscape of farm, town and deserts; the jostling of so many different peoples, all a bit bewildered at finding themselves thrown together … Certainly Fresnans never forgave Saroyan for his harsher observations about the old hometown. The more political Armenians complained he wasted too many words on the human comedy, and not enough on the tragedy of a lost homeland. That he wrote so personally, and from the heart, gave literary critics their target: He was, they scolded, an undisciplined sentimentalist, mawkish. … For whatever reasons, Saroyan today is held under book-land quarantine. Few of his titles are in print. He's barely taught in schools. His own plans for literary legacy — a writers-in-residence program, posthumous publication of many works — have been scrapped or stalled. They did name a theater after him in Fresno, the one thing he expressly requested not be done. Those who remain under the Saroyan spell can only hope that the world will come around. His work simply seems too extraordinary, and universal, to be cleared from the shelves..."
"I've been reading William Saroyan's short story "Cowards", a wonderful story about a man who hid under the bed during World War I. It's just the right short story to read right now in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war... [The characters] are Armenian Americans... in Fresno, California, but they are Americans, and they are all going off to fight in Europe during World War I. And now we are fighting again, all in different configurations. The story asks, "What is cowardice?" Is it a refusal to fight or is it just going in to fight? But that's just one little short story, and it didn't stop World War II, but maybe evolution is longer than that."
"A great man for the arts should be celebrated not because of the past, but for the future."
"He was the first writer I fell in love with, boyishly in love. I was held by his unaffected voice, his sentimentality, his defiant individualism. I found myself in the stories he told... I learned from Saroyan that you do not have to live in some great city — in New York or Paris — in order to write... When I was a student at Stanford, a generation ago, the name of William Saroyan was never mentioned by any professor in the English Department. William Saroyan apparently was not considered a major American talent. Instead, we undergraduates set about the business of psychoanalyzing Hamlet and deconstructing Lolita. In my mind Saroyan belongs with John Steinbeck, a fellow small town Californian and of the same generation. He belongs with Thornton Wilder, with those writers whose aching love of America was formed by the Depression and the shadow of war. … Saroyan's prose is as plain as it is strong. He talks about the pleasure of drinking water from a hose on a summer afternoon in California's Central Valley, and he holds you with the pure line. My favorite is his novel The Human Comedy... In 1943, The Human Comedy became an MGM movie starring Mickey Rooney, but I always imagined Homer Macaulay as a darker, more soulful boy, someone who looked very much like a young William Saroyan..."
"Always, Bill talked about being and becoming a writer, of all the stories and ideas inside him that had to come out. We knew he had been sending out stories all along and collecting rejection slips but the day in 1934 when Joe Danysh and I arrived at the front door of the gallery and found the envelope addressed to us both, we knew it had really begun. Inside were two one dollar bills, two street car transfers and a card which read "One for the, money / one for the show / one For Virginia / and one for Joe." Signed William Shakespeare."
"I don’t care what anyone says, it affects you, it never stops affecting you."
"Elena understood that sometimes it was a terrible thing to be the one who lived, that this could be a weight in your heart that never left."
"I found my smartest patients were the most difficult, and I think Carlos was the smartest one of all. - Joaquin Morales"
"It leaves scars in my head, it leaves scars all the time. - Colin"
"Legs will always be the biggest problem. That’s always the case. Legs, legs, legs. For every arm I’ve amputated here, I’ve probably taken ten legs. Puzzling, isn’t it? . . . I think human legs * simply weren't designed for modern war. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"
"There is no pattern to who lives and who dies in war . . . In war, people die because they do. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"
"We are all animals . . . special animals, but still animals. - Joaquin Morales"
"Do you know what Pesh Merga means? It means 'those who face death'. . . I myself have never seen one face death; they all turn away at the end. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"
""If I stay too long in here, I begin killing more patients than I save." He laughed lightly. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"
"We've been losing wars forever; it's what we Kurds do best . . . We are like the little guy at the bar who wants to fight all the big men. We get beaten up by one, then get up off the floor and go for another. Over and over. A lifetime of war, can you imagine? - Dr Ahmet Talzani"
"Homeland. It doesn't matter what you do or even what you believe, you never escape the homeland. It always keeps you. They talk of free will, but we are all just homing pigeons in the end. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"
"Ah well, these little mysteries, morbid curiosities, war is full of them. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"
"Would you believe that sometimes I am so tired, or the cave is so dark, I'm not even sure of the colours I give them? Would you believe that men have been given blues, have been set aside to die, suffering from nothing more than dehydration or a broken arm? Disturbing, I know, but it's true. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"
"My little tags are for them, because they need to believe there is a system. For me, I know it is all fate . . . Some live, some die, that's all. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"
"Some live, some die. It's the only way to view it. Anything else is just self-torture and arrogance. Because we are not gods, none of us are gods. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"
"I have a suggestion for Microsoft — no fancy programming required. Just let us users hang out a "Do Not Disturb" sign. Then leave us alone. We're dreaming."
"To listen to Mr. Engelbart that day almost five years ago was to realize that the computer industry, when it started, was not simply about becoming a chief executive or retiring on stock options at 35. It was to remember that real innovation — the stuff that made computers so much more than "crummy factors of production" — comes from mysterious places, wild people, dreamers and tinkerers, and to remember all the skepticism they had to endure."
"We build our computers the way we build our cities--over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."
"I always say that a girl never really looks as well as she does on board a steamship, or even a yacht."
"For twelve months now, since I first began the practice of law, since I became an attorney, a man who speak for others, a counselor at law who has the power to address the court, that’s right, a big man, a mature person who helps others in distress—for approximately 365 days time has been nothing but a never-ending experience that meets me in the morning just like it left me off the night before. No longer am I the clear-headed mathematician of my college years. I used to have the answers; and if I didn’t, I could always turn to the back of the book or ask Professor Blackburn at Wednesday morning’s advanced algebra class. For a year now, my only conscious concern has been the pain in my stomach, the arguments of Dr. Serbin, and the schedules of the television shows. I know them all by heart. I can quote every single fucking show on Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, and, you won’t believe it, even on the educational station, Channel 9. I am the world’s only living T.V. Guide, that’s really what I am. And they want me to counsel them!"
"The truth of the matter is that death is a mystery to me. I have no opinion on the subject."
"Young, blond fags with powder-blue eyes and soft shoes skipped along arm-in-arm. Chinese girls with long hair and black stockings carried metal pots into Ernie’s Delicatessen for bean cake, barbequed duck, Chinese curds and steamed rice. Art students from the Art Institute, draftsmen from Heald’s College and law students from S.F. Law School walked by in carefree abandon, none of them in pain, all with beautiful girls in red slippers. They had leather, beads and books and pipes and scabs of hair on their interesting faces. Polk Street at night was always Christmas Eve for lonely men such as myself."
"I’m an innocent, brown-eyed child of the sun. Just a peach-picker’s boy from the West Side. Riverbank. My father’s a janitor with only a third-grade education and my mother makes tortillas at 5:00 A.M. before she goes to the cannery."
"I simply nod, for I have already noticed the short distance between his right and left eyes. It is my secret way of detecting fags. I know he will speak. And the first thing the idiot says is, “Are you by any chance Samoan?” All my life strangers have been interested in my ancestry. There is something about my bearing that cries out for history. I’ve been mistaken for American Indian, Spanish, Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan and Arabian. No one has ever asked me if I’m a spic or a greaser. Am I Samoan? “Aren’t we all?” I groan."
"He reached his hand toward me. “You don’t mind my asking, do you?” “Of course not,” I say calmly as I reverse the lit end of the cigarette so that the flame is cupped in the palm. I reach for his handshake. He screams like a woman in distress with her skirt held high. I puff my meanness as he licks at the burn and whimpers, “You sonofagun. You’ve burned the dickens out of my hand.” “I know.” “But why? I didn’t do anything. I don’t even know you.” “I guess it’s my Samoan blood.” Sal rushes to my defense. He points his finger at the fag. “Out!” “But I didn’t do anything.” “Out, out!” he shouts, his hands stiffly on the bar. The old fag picks himself up and begins to drag himself out."
"Manuel Mercado Acosta is an indio from the mountains of Durango. His father operated a mescal distillery before the revolutionaries drove him out. He met my mother while riding a motorcycle in El Paso. Juana Fierro Acosta is my mother. She could have been a singer in a Juarez cantina but instead decided to be Manuel’s wife because he had a slick mustache, a fast bike and promised to take her out of the slums across from the Rio Grande. She had only one demand in return for the two sons and three daughters she would bear him: “No handouts. No relief. I never want to be on welfare.” I doubt he really promised her anything in a very loud, clear voice. My father was a horsetrader even though he got rid of both the mustache and the bike when FDR drafted him, a wetback, into the U.S. Navy on June 22, 1943. He tried to get into the Marines, but when they found out he was a good swimmer and a non-citizen they put him in a sailor suit and made him drive a barge in Okinawa. We lived in a two-room shack without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in 100-pound sacks which my mother used to make dresses, sheets and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted every year with corn, tomatoes and yellow chiles for the hot sauce. Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making the tortillas at 5:00 A.M. while he chopped the logs we’d hauled up from the river on the weekends."
"In fact the only times we could read funny books was when my father was in the Navy. Nothing would infuriate him more than to catch us browsing through Captain Marvel or Plastic Man. Men, after all, didn’t waste their time reading funny books. Men, he’d tell us, took life seriously. Nothing could be learned from books that were funny."
"When we left El Segundo Barrio across the street from the international border, we didn’t expect the Mexicans in California to act like gringos. But they did. We were outsiders because of geography and outcasts because we didn’t speak English and wore short pants. And so we had to fight every single day."
"We had to fight the Okies because we were Mexicans! It didn’t matter to them that my brother and I were outcasts on our own turf. They’d have laughed if we’d told them that we were easterners. To them we were greasers, spics and niggers. If you lived on the West Side, across from the tracks, and had brown skin, you were a Mexican. Riverbank is divided into three parts, and in my corner of the world there were only three kinds of people: Mexicans, Okies and Americans. Catholics, Holy Rollers and Protestants. Peach pickers, cannery workers and clerks."
"That same night I went into the chicken coop, took my hooked knife which I used to pit peaches with, and carved her initials on the back side of my left hand … JA. Jane Addison. My first true love. The original Miss It. I was in such a fog that I forgot to cover it with a glove or something. At supper, right in front of my mother, my brother Bob said in a loud voice, “What’s that on your hand?” I pretended not to hear. I quickly switched my fork to my right hand and put my left hand under the table. “Hey, mom. Oscar cut himself,” the bastard said. “What?” she cried out. She couldn’t stand violence unless it was part of some beating to teach me respect."
"Ever since I’d shown my bleeding arms to my sweetheart we hadn’t spoken a word. I’d simply decided to wait until she told me she appreciated carved tatoos. But she never did. She just ignored my obvious suffering. The pain in my gut, the secret gnawing at my belly didn’t concern her one damn bit. Things got so bad for me I finally took to smoking like all my buddies were already doing. I rolled up whole pages of old funny books and smoked the shit until my lungs ached. I’d cut vines from the ivy that crawled up the sides of the chicken coop and puff on my homemade cigars until my head buzzed."
"On the way home from school, I’d go two blocks out of my way to pass by Lopez’ Pool Hall to look for cigarette butts that the veteranos had flicked to the sidewalk. They had G.I. hair cuts, their old, spit-shined paratrooper boots and the same khaki uniforms they wore to fight the Japs. I’d pretend not to notice them leaning against the building. With my head down, I’d walk along the gutter and just casually push the longer butts with my toe as if I were kicking a can or a rock … just a barefoot boy with cheek humhumming along the road on a hot summer day in his Huckleberry Finn strides, oh yes!"
"I’d kick the butt, without missing a step or crushing it, all the way to the corner, turn to see if they were looking in my direction, then pick it up and run to the little park behind the Santa Fe Depot where I kept my penny box of matches hidden in an old squirrel’s nest. Then I’d light her up and suck up the hot, delicious smoke that made one a man and life barely tolerable."
"Even after my old man returned from the wars with all his ribbons and a thousand stories I still struggled for survival without my love. He was so busy rigging up the house to look like a ship, printing the rules of command on little notes which he pinned to the wall above the sink, Attention: Do not waste water … Do not throw garbage in here; in the outhouse and in the washroom, Attention: Toilet paper rules … Use only four sections per use … Do not throw funny paper in commode. I doubt if he noticed my dying condition."
"He introduced me to all the intellectuals at S.F. State and convinced me I should be a writer since I had so many fucking stories to tell. Little did he know I was scared shitless of all those guys with the tweed coats and fancy pipes."
"Since I was about ten years younger than this crew of alcoholics, I just listened and filled their cups with cheap wine. After they’d had enough, I’d tell them of my escapades in Riverbank and in Panama where I’d worked with the Southern Baptist Convention and Jesus Christ to save the black souls of niggers, spics and Indians. I used to keep my eye on Harris when I told my stories. He had this nasty habit of pulling out a little notebook in the middle of a conversation and jotting down, as he said, “story ideas.” Later on, after I’d transferred to S.F. State and taken his writing course, he asked me if I wanted to read his first draft of Wake Up, Stupid! I kept it for a week and returned it to him at the next short story seminar. I only read the first paragraph. After that, I was no longer afraid of the intellectuals. I knew I could tell a better story."
"Before it was over, I had built a mission in Chilibre, a small village with black Jamaicans and brown Panamanians, and one at the Palo Seco Leper Colony. They had been waiting for someone like me all their life. We built a church out of palm trees and mango leaves. We sang in Spanish and in English and occasionally I played my clarinet for them and warned them against civilization. I told them to stay out of Panama City, to lay off their home brew made from masticated corn and to quit smoking coco leaves. In return, I no longer went to movies, quit playing jazz and didn’t touch my penis except to piss for two whole years. They elected me to the Board of Deacons at the First Baptist Church in Balboa after I became so successful in the jungle. They even sent some of my color slides to the churches back home and told them that a “Mexican Billy Graham” was converting natives right and left. In exchange the Southern Baptists sent Pastor Beebee more money to make new additions to the church. It already looked like an old mansion on a southern plantation."
"But I was miserable. I hurt inside. I didn’t have the peace of mind that Jesus promised if we did his work. I didn’t have the very thing I preached. Finally, in January of 1956 when I had but six months to go on my tour of duty, I made up my mind to settle it once and for all. I made a final study of the Bible and wrote down everything that sounded true in a notebook on my right. Those things that sounded wrong or inconsistent or that I couldn’t believe, I wrote in a notebook to my left. For three months, between 3:00 and 7:00 A.M., sitting under a single bulb in the attic above the barracks, I made a comparative study of the Synoptic Gospels. When I finished, the left-handed notebook was completely filled with chapter and verse and reasons why I could not believe in Christianity. The right-handed notebook contained about two pages of homilies on love. So I gave up Jesus and the Baptist Church."
"I was twenty-one and without God. I had no one to love me and no one for me to love. Since there was no after-life, what then did it matter? I leaned forward, ready to lurch to my doom."
"When I have the one million Brown Buffalos on my side I will present the demands for a new nation to both the U.S. Government and the United Nations … and then I’ll split and write the book. I have no desire to be a politician. I don’t want to lead anyone. I have no practical ego. I am not ambitious. I merely want to do what is right. Once in every century there comes a man who is chosen to speak for his people. Moses, Mao and Martin are examples. Who’s to say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices. Perhaps that is why the gods have sent me into Riverbank, Panama, San Francisco, Alpine and Juarez. Perhaps that is why I’ve been taught so many trades. Who will deny that I am unique? For months, for years, no, all my life I sought to find out who I am. Why do you think I became a Baptist? Why did I try to force myself into the Riverbank Swimming Pool? And did I become a lawyer just to prove to the publishers I could do something worthwhile? Any idiot that sees only the obvious is blind. For God sake, I have never seen and I have never felt inferior to any man or beast. My single mistake has been to seek an identity with any one person or nation or with any part of history.… What I see now, on this rainy day in January, 1968, what is clear to me after this sojourn is that I am neither a Mexican nor an American. I am neither a Catholic nor a Protestant. I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice."
"Oscar was not into serious street-fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250 lb Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach – but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at the age of 33 – just like Jesus Christ – you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Especially if the bastard is already 33½ years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile vomiting geysers of pure blood off the front porch every 30 or 40 minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can't handle any more raw tequila."
"One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
"This negation of our existence, and the omitting of our stories and histories, is one of the reasons I write — I write to exist. We cannot escape our past; our past determines what choices we make for the future. It determines how we act, how we see ourselves…"
"It’s easier for me to point out what makes bad literature: forced language, too much description, poor word choice, writing things just for shock value, shitty plots, clichés, lack of research, lazy writing, people who are trying to write “diversely” for the sake of diversity. Good literature is the opposite of that…"
"It is an American story. And it’s a Mexican story. I’m the child of immigrants. Being the child of immigrants is always this liminal space of, where do I fit in? It is complex. And the older I get, the more complex it becomes. I was born here. What I celebrate is the America that I grew up in—it’s very brown, it’s very Mexican…"
"Living on the hyphen is a complex cultural existence at times, and we’re often pulled in many directions where allegiance is always demanded. It is a fractured state of being, though I don’t think it’s necessarily bad; at least the having multiple ways of looking at life-the Mexican and American/the male and female. Where that goes awry is when we want to make one way of approaching life, The One Way. That’s where things begin to disintegrate, loyalties are questioned, and patriarchies are born…"
"More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and N. K. Jemisin."
"But too many people had come to him and Jaldis over the years, asking for magic to fix their lives. He knew of no spell which could not be twisted out of its purpose by fate, no potion which would for better or for worse change a human soul’s inner essence. No sigil he’d made had ever altered the words that rose automatically to a person’s lips when they weren’t thinking. Yet people kept acting as if someday the laws of magic would spontaneously change and spells would do all these things."
"“I brought coffee.” “Dinar of Prinagos has just won my unqualified support against the perfidious White Bragenmeres under any circumstances, at any time, in thought, word, deed, spell, and incantation.”"
"“I suppose the talisman you gave me will keep people from noticing a full-grown horse?” “I’m not sure,” he said, gladly accepting the offer of a straight line. “It might keep them from noticing half of it but then the rest would be awfully conspicuous.”"
"“Where’d you learn to make coffee like this?…If wizardry ever quits paying, you really will be welcome in my father’s service.” “What do you mean, if wizardry ever quits paying?” Rhion demanded in mock indignation. “For one thing, as you may have noticed, wizardry doesn’t pay, and for another, making good coffee is wizardry.”"
"Loving and hating were so close, two sides of a coin whose name was Need."
"“Why do they call them love-spells, anyway?” he added bitterly. “It isn’t love, you know.” “Maybe because some people can’t tell the difference.…Or if they suspect there’s a difference, they don’t want to know.”"
"The priests of Agon saw in wizardry what the priests of all the cults of the gods saw: a body of men and women who did not need to petition the deities for assistance, a challenge to their authority, and a living question about the way they said the world worked."
"Now they had given their wills to Agon, and it was Agon who acted through them—they could spy upon their benefactors, they could betray their friends, they could torture the weak, prostitute themselves, beat a helpless old cripple to death in an alleyway, and remain, in their hearts, good people, kindly people, men and women worthy of regard, because it was, after all, the Veiled God who was acting, not them."
"From what I understand only the priests of Agon claim to have seen the Great Evils, and then they pretty much seem to be whatever will fit Agon’s purposes at the time."
"Crackpot Hall has eleven thousand rooms, but only one potty."
"If your head explodes, I am not cleaning it up."
"Life is a prison if you cannot leave it as you like."
"Panic poisons; levelheaded lives."
"You look all right to me, although may be a bit wiggly about the edges. But perhaps I just need coffee."
"I shook my head. I had been too busy panicking to do anything that sensible."
"Nini Mo says that most courage comes from being too tired and hungry to be afraid anymore. If exhaustion and hunger were the hallmarks of courage, then I was the bravest person that ever lived."
"It’s amazing what a little maquillage can do for you, particularly if you don’t lay it on with a trowel."
"My childhood had a great influence in making me very determined to be independent and listen to my own voice. And that really put me in very good stead when I started my corporate career. I had built up my career, and I had climbed the corporate ladder. After a couple of decades, I had worked myself up to being a Vice President and General Manager of a Fortune 500 Company in Silicon Valley."
"I literally woke up one morning and said 'I am going to write a book.' I didn't write it from chapter one. I just tried to get to know who these women [my ancestors] were. I wrote in their voices for a couple of months. I would write it as a diary, and then I would put two of them in the room together and see how they interacted with one another. And then I put three in a room together until I began to really feel that I had a handle on who they were and how they would react. And what happened was a novel."
"“There is a special way of seeing come with age and distance, a kind of knowing how things happen even without knowing why. Seeing what show up one or two generations removed, from a father to a son or grandson, like repeating threads weaving through the same bolt of cloth. Repeating scraps at the foot and the head of a quilt.”"
"“We been writ out of the history of this town. They got a metal marker down to the courthouse tell a crazy twisting of what really happen Easter Sunday sixty years ago. The ones with the upper hand make the story fit how they want, and tell it so loud people tricked into thinking it real but writing down don’t make it so. The littlest colored child in Colfax, Louisiana, know better than to speak the truth of that time out loud, but real stories somehow carry forward, generation to generation.”"
"“Making a better way for the children. In the end, making a better life for our children what we all want.”"
"It isn't as if there were a lot of women, let alone African American women vice presidents," Tademy said. "There was a lot of bewilderment. And then 18 months later, when I said I was going to write a book, that's when people's eyes rolled back in their heads."
"In my head, I lived on the plantation, and then I lived through the Civil War, and then I lived in Reconstruction and then I lived in the Jim Crow South, " she said. "It was always very personal, and I think that's something that's an added complexity. I was these women, but on the flip side, they were me. I really felt them as ancestors, not just characters I made up."
"An author's life is very solitary and that part is sometimes difficult," she said. "I think about how stimulating it was to have so many smart people around (at Sun Microsystems), but I enjoy this."
"“You can’t tell how heavy somebody else’s load is just from looking. The Lord doesn’t give us more than we can carry.”"
"“Sometimes while you wait for what you think is better … what is good enough slips away.”"
"“There is nothing more satisfying than having plans.”"
"“This was the face of slavery. To have nothing, and still have something more to lose.”"