Literature

"Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography."

"Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyse yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak."

"Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two."

"While it is nice to describe a beautiful rose in full bloom, it would be incomplete without a description of everything—right from its roots, the stem, the manure and nutrients that have sustained it, the fresh and dried leaves as also the thorns, in order to conceptualize the beauty of that rose in all its dimensions. Likewise, for a human being’s biography, he needs to be presented ‘as is’ and not ‘as should be’—from head to toe, nothing more, nothing less, as transparent and true to reality as one can be. Everything that can be said or unsaid, that is embarrassing or praiseworthy has to be documented without inhibitions and fears. Of course given the social and political situation that I am writing these in, despite my will, some of the details are being suppressed a little. Also, it would be a breach of trust to reveal confidential details of renowned people whom I have had the good fortune of meeting and interacting with closely in my life. Still, I hold a promise that I have revealed all that needs to be revealed, with the least of colours and bias from my side."

"A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor."

"I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't."

"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

"Nothing is more difficult than writing an autobiography. What should be emphasized? Just what is of general interest? It is advisable, above all, to write honestly and dispense with any of the conventional introductory protestations of modesty. For if one is called upon to tell about one's life so as to make the events that made it what it became useful to the general public, it can mean only that one must have already wrought something positive in life, accomplished a task that people recognize. Accordingly it is a matter of forgetting that one is writing about oneself, of making an effort to abjure one's ego so as to give an account, as objectively as possible, of one's life in the making and of one's accomplishments."

"It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore, I shall be short. It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life; but this Narrative shall contain little more than the History of my Writings; as, indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations. The first success of most of my writing was not such as to be an object of vanity."

"I think that some of our truths are things that are not dealt with in standard autobiography. I think that dreams are very important to women-and important to everybody's psyche-and to have access to those dreams is a great power. Also visions that we have about what we might do, also prayers-that's another "silent, secret" kind of thing. I think part of what we have to do is figure out a new kind of autobiography that can tell the truth about dreams and visions and prayers. I find that absolutely necessary for our mental and political health. I think the standard autobiography is about exterior things, like when you were born and what you participate in-big historical events that you publicly participate in-and those kinds of autobiographies ignore the rich, personal inner life. I feel that it's a mission for me to invent a new autobiographical form that truly tells the inner life of women, and I do think it's especially important for minority people, because we're always on the brink of disappearing. (1990)"

"Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible."

"I don't think anybody should write his autobiography until after he's dead."

"All autobiography is self-indulgent."

"An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing."

"Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction."

"A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become."

"Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. [...] For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form—it may be called fleeting or eternal—is in neither case the stuff that life is made of."

"Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self."

"All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction."

"In “Unbearable Weight”, I describe the postmodern body, increasingly fed on “fantasies of rearranging, transforming, and correcting, limitless improvement and change, defying the historicity, the mortality, and indeed, the very materiality of the body. In place of that materiality, we now have cultural plastic.” When I wrote these words, the most recent statistics, from 1989, listed 681,000 surgical procedures performed. In 2001, 8.5 million procedures were performed. They are cheaper than ever, safer than ever, and increasingly used, not for correcting major defects, but for “contouring” the face and body. Plastic surgeons seem to have no ethical problem with this. “I’m not here to play philosopher king,” says Dr. Randal Haworth in a “Vogue” interview; “I don’t have a problem with women who already look good and want to look perfect”. Perfect. When did “perfection” become applicable to a human body? The word suggest a Platonic form of timeless beauty-appropriate for marble, perhaps, but not for living flesh. We change, we age, we die. Learning to deal with this is part of the existential challenge-and richness-of mortal life. But nowadays, those who can afford to do so have traded the messiness and fragility of life, the vulnerability of intimacy, the comfort of human connection, for fantasies of limitless achievement, “triumphing” over everything that gets in the way, “going for the gold.” The Greeks called it hubris. We call it our “right” to be all that we can be."

"In the fantasies they committed to paper, the men associated the women they despised with floods of liquid and slime, and with dirt – substances that would threaten to overwhelm the defences of their ill-formed psyches."

"In 1977, Klaus Theweleit published a book in which he sought to understand the germination of fascism in interwar Germany. His method was to study the fantasy life of that era’s conservative revolutionaries, by reading the diaries, novels and letters of the men who joined the Freikorps militias, and fought against insurgent communists during the early days of the Weimar Republic."

"Our writers, I believe, discern a resemblance between the world and their books. Through fantasy, they are saying something about life which could not be said within the naturalistic frame of reference."

"It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves."

"The "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable … soon."

"The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy."

"Fantasy is a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent."

"Fantasy literature, in its broadest definition from "Cinderella" to "Beowulf" to Stephen Donaldson, is literature which makes deliberate use of something known to be impossible."

"It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable."

"What can be fearful but fantasy, and no-one turns to fantasy unless he despairs of finding satisfaction in reality. Yet it is certain that he will never find satisfaction in fantasy, so that his only hope is to change his mind about reality... The impossible can happen only in fantasy. When you search for reality in fantasies you will not find it. The symbols of fantasy are of the ego, and of these you will find many. But do not look for meaning in them. They have no more meaning than the fantasies into which they are woven. Fairy tales can be pleasant or fearful... Children may believe them, and so, for a while, the tales are true for them. Yet when reality dawns the fantasies are gone. Reality has not gone in the meanwhile. The Second Coming is the awareness of reality, not its return... reality is here. It belongs to you and me... and is perfectly satisfying to all of us. p. 209-210"

"Children do confuse fantasy and reality, and they are frightened because they do not know the difference. p. 132"

"No fantasies are true. They are distortions of perception, by definition. They are a means of making false associations, and obtaining pleasure from them. Man can do this only because he is creative. But although he can perceive false associations, he can never make them real except to himself. Man believes in what he creates... [Eventually] fantasies become totally unnecessary as the wholly satisfying nature of reality becomes apparent..."

"Fantasy is a distorted form of vision. Fantasies of any kind are distortions, because they always involve twisting perception into unreality. Actions that stem from distortions are literally the reactions of those who know not what they do. Fantasy is an attempt to control reality according to false needs. Twist reality in any way and you are perceiving destructively. Fantasies are a means of making false associations and attempting to obtain pleasure from them. But although you can perceive false associations, you can never make them real except to yourself. You believe in what you make. If you offer miracles, you will be equally strong in your belief in them. The strength of your conviction will then sustain the belief of the miracle receiver. Reality is "lost" through usurpation, which produces tyranny. As long as a single "slave" remains to walk the earth, your release is not complete."

"John Bell: What attracted you initially to heroic fantasy, a subgenre of fantastic literature that was once notorious for its less-than-enlightened racial attitude?"

"I suppose the fantastic is what you imagine, but as soon as you do a fantastic thing, it's no longer fantastic, it becomes real."

"The Thousand and One Nights, with its magnificent apparatus of genii and afrits, is the greatest work of fantasy that has ever been evolved by tradition, and given literary form. But it, alas, is not English, and has no English equivalent. The Western world does not seem to have conceived the necessity of fairy-tales for grown-ups — though it has been suggested that the modern detective story is an equivalent — and that is perhaps why it condemns them to a life of unremitted toil."

"Harmless erotic fantasies are terrific, it’s the lousy ones you have to look out for—the harmful, destructive, morbid erotic fixations—real sadism, killing, blood-letting, torturing where the pleasure is in the victim’s actual pain, etc. Those are 100 per cent bad and I won’t have any part of them."

"Those who lack wisdom are children... Children do confuse fantasy and reality, and they are frightened because they do not know the difference. p. 132 What can be fearful but fantasy, and no-one turns to fantasy unless he despairs of finding satisfaction in reality. Yet it is certain that he will never find satisfaction in fantasy, so that his only hope is to change his mind about reality... The impossible can happen only in fantasy. When you search for reality in fantasies you will not find it. The symbols of fantasy are of the ego, and of these you will find many. But do not look for meaning in them. They have no more meaning than the fantasies into which they are woven. Fairy tales can be pleasant or fearful... Children may believe them, and so, for a while, the tales are true for them. Yet when reality dawns the fantasies are gone. Reality has not gone in the meanwhile. The Second Coming is the awareness of reality, not its return... reality is here. It belongs to you and me... and is perfectly satisfying to all of us."

"Fantasies of any kind are distorted forms of thinking because they always involve twisting perception into unreality. Fantasy is a debased form of vision. Vision and revelation are closely related, while fantasy and projection are more closely associated because both attempt to control external reality according to false internal needs. Twist reality in any way, and you are perceiving destructively. Reality was lost through usurpation, which in turn produced tyranny... No fantasies are true. They are distortions of perception, by definition. They are a means of making false associations, and obtaining pleasure from them. Man can do this only because he is creative. But although he can perceive false associations, he can never make them real except to himself. Man believes in what he creates... [Eventually] fantasies become totally unnecessary as the wholly satisfying nature of reality becomes apparent..."

"Maeda Toshio suggests that aside the theme of human selfishness, the hard-core rape and tentacle porn with which this manga and animation have become synonymous, are "Fantasy service [extras] for the male readers, men are hen-pecked by their wives and their are wages are increasingly equal to women's so they like the rape scenes as they restore their sense of power.""

"Good fantasy, unlike other genres, is more resilient to the tests of time, mainly because the ceaseless march of technology leaves less of a mark."

"It [fantasy literature] is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them."

"She’d once told Devon, “I'm more interested in things that are real.” He’d been playing the game. Monitor-glow made his head a silhouette. He said, “What’s real is just an accident. No one designed reality to be compelling.” He gestured to the screen. “But a fantasy world is so designed. It takes the most interesting things that ever existed—like knights in armor and pirates on the high seas—and combines them with the most interesting things that anyone ever dreamed up—fire-breathing dragons and blood-drinking vampires. It’s the world as it should be, full of wonder and adventure. To privilege reality simply because it is reality just represents a kind of mental parochialism.”"

""This sort of fiction, commonly called "sword and sorcery" by its fans, is not fantasy at its lowest, but it still has a pretty tacky feel; mostly it's the Hardy Boys dressed up in animal skins and rated R ( and with cover art by Jeff Jones, as likely as not). Sword and sorcery novels and stories are tales of power for the powerless. The fellow who is afraid of being rousted by those young punks who hang around his bus stop can go home at night and imagine himself wielding a sword, his potbelly miraculously gone, his slack muscles magically transmuted into those "iron thews" which have been sung and storied in the pulps for the last fifty years."

"The Onion: How did you develop your particular visual style?"

"The Onion: How did your interest in fantasy first develop?"

"My fantasy since I was a small child was to dominate a dominating man. That turns me on more than anything, a man who does not want to be dominated—like Sean Connery, a really macho man. The kind of man who has no desire for submission. It’s truly perverse. It’s the power play: who has it, how long you have it for, and what you do with it."

"Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it — I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying "That's the world." And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things."

"Thus, modern pleasure seeking according to Campbell is no longer related to the senses but to activities like daydreaming or fantasizing. The purpose of goods in this context is to act as props. They are the building blocs around which consumers create their pleasurable visions."

"There, Master Niketas," Baudolino said, "when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. ... There is nothing better than imagining other worlds," he said, "to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one."