Novelists From The United States

"Intercourse is a world that moves through the sexed world of dominance and submission. It moves in descending circles, not in a straight line, and as in a vortex each spiral goes down deeper."

"The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too."

"Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do."

"Those leftists who champion Sade might do well to remember that prerevolutionary France was filled with starving people. The feudal system was both cruel and crude. The rights of the aristocracy to the labor and bodies of the poor were unchallenged and not challengeable. The tyranny of class was absolute. The poor sold what they could, including themselves, to survive. Sade learned and upheld the ethic of his class."

"Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history."

"Boys and Men do experience sexual abuse at the hands of men. The honmophobes distorting concentration on this fact, which cannot and must not be denied, neatly eliminates from view the primary victim of male sexual abuse: women and girls. This is congruent with the fact that crimes against females are ultimately viewed as expressions of male normalcy, while crimes against men and boys are viewed as perversions of that same normalcy. Society's general willingness to do anything necessary to protect boys and men from male sexual aggression is testimony to the value of a male life. Society's general refusal to do anything meaningful to protect women and girls from male sexual aggression is testimony to the worthlessness of a female life. A male life must be protected for its own sake. A female life warrants protection only when the female belongs to a male, as wife, daughter, mistress, whore; it is the owner who has a right to have his rights over his females protected from other men. A female's bodily integrity or well-being is not protected because of the value of the woman as a human being in her own right."

"Men renounce whatever they have in common with women so as to experience no commonality with women; and whatis left according to men, is one piece of flesh a few inches long, the penis."

"Two thousand years ago, we lived in a world of Gods and Goddesses. Today, we live in a world solely of Gods. Women in most cultures have been stripped of their spiritual power."

"If I'm not at my desk by 4 AM, I feel like I'm missing my most productive hours. In addition to starting early, I keep an antique hour glass on my desk and every hour break briefly to do pushups, sit-ups, and some quick stretches. I find this helps keep the blood (and ideas) flowing."

"I never imagined so many people would be enjoying it this much. I wrote this book essentially as a group of fictional characters exploring ideas that I found personally intriguing."

"Secrets interest us all, I think."

"Google is not a synonym for research."

"I am not an atheist — I think I'm happily confused and a work in progress; I'm sort of more agnostic. I do think that science has become the lens through which we see the world, more and more."

"Dan Brown has to be one of the best, smartest, and most accomplished writers in the country. The Da Vinci Code is many notches above the intelligent thriller; this is pure genius."

"The world of publishing is in crisis. It's no coincidence that the worst published writer in the world today is also one of the world's most successful writers... Dan Brown. Now Dan Brown is not a good writer, The Da Vinci Code is not literature. Dan Brown writes sentences like "The famous man looked at the red cup." …and it's only to be hoped that Dan Brown never gets a job where he's required to break bad news. "Doctor is he going to be alright?" "The seventy five year old man died a painful death on the large green table... it was sad"."

"Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code … a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name. … Even Dan Brown must live. Preferably not write, but live."

"Critics have found in the narrative a veneer of erudition that cloaks nothing more than a James Bond-style romp, albeit a highly addictive one. His publisher has described it as 'a thriller for people who don't like thrillers'. One newspaper put it thus: 'It is terribly written, its characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is excruciating in places and, a bit like a computer manual, everything is overstated and repeated — but it is impossible to put the bloody thing down.'"

"It’s time for us to wake up and face the truth, that we are a captive species on a prison planet, but the fact that we are so close to understanding the science of our imprisonment means that we are also just beginning to touch the key that locks the door, and if we are strong, if we defy and defeat the sinister forces that rule us now, we have a chance at last to unlock this place and do what we are able to do, that we are richly capable of doing, that those who love us—and they are out there, too—have hoped and sought that we should do from time immemorial."

"They know how to use chance"

"Odysseus returned at last, neither dead nor alive, somehow still attached to this ruined corpse—a spirit perhaps unwanted among spirits and forced to remain in the dead house of its body."

"Interestingly, if you ask three people what it means to be Christian, you will get three different answers. Some feel being baptized is sufficient. Others feel you must accept the Bible as absolute historical fact. Still others require a belief that all those who do not accept Christ as their personal savior are doomed to hell. Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious — that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment. I consider myself a student of many religions. The more I learn, the more questions I have. For me, the spiritual quest will be a life-long work in progress."

"The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination."

"There are, of course, good happy endings as well as bad ones, but surely they are of a kind that in some way expresses happiness rather than glibly promises it.."

"For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance."

"Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything."

"Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it."

"Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs."

"The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy."

"One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well."

"Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfilment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon."

"In art there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts."

"The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy."

"There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave."

"On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit […] Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong."

"And I realized that the only purpose to revolution is to be able to love who you want, how you want, when you want and where you want..."

"And I have a dream of a New American Language, one with a little bit more Spanish. I have a dream of a new pop music, that tells the truth with a good beat and some nice harmonies."

"Are you gonna follow your soul? Or just the style of the day?"

"Stop... Stop what you're doing... Stop what you're doing and breathe."

"Merkle should have touched second base."

"Sentio aliquos togatos contra me conspirare. I think some people in togas are plotting against me."

"Lege atque lacrima. Read-em and weep."

"Anates tuas in acie instrue. Get your ducks in a row."

"Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere. If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

"Podex perfectus es. Claim it means: You did a terrific job. What it really means: You are a total asshole."

"Stercorem pro cerebro habes. Claim it means: That's certainly food for thought. What it really means: You have shit for brains."

"Futue te ipsum et caballum tuum. Claim it means: I've really got to take my hat off to you. What it really means: Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."

"Taedium pellucidorum. An eye condition that keeps you from looking at people's slides."

"Perennial: Any plant which, had it lived, would have bloomed year after year."

"Si hoc signum legere potes, operis boni in rebus Latinis alacribus et fructuosis potiri potes! If you can read this sign, you can get a good job in the fast-paced, high-paying world of Latin!"

"Having done these things, they made the sacrifices prescribed by custom lest they be found lacking in filial piety."