Novelists From The United States

"I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in The Catcher in the Rye. Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach."

"She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together."

"My sister and I really showed an interest in [performing] and dedication, and [our mother] was like, 'How can I tell my kids no?' It's the same as kids that are going into sports. Parents support them and push them."

"It's more like giving people a taste of what the tour will be like. It's getting people to hear the music to a different sound … We remixed some of the songs so they sound totally different. It's really energetic."

"When you are under the control of a label, you don't always get to have the sound you like. If I could change it, I would, and it would sound [less pop]. My name is Hilary Duff, and I don't know why I don't get to make Hilary Duff music. I just have to get the freedom to do it, and during the show, I do get to do that: I get to throw away all of the CD stuff that has been mastered and sounds really pretty, and I get to sing live."

"I love the song ["Weird"] too. It is really weird when you listen to the beat and the words. It's about someone that she's still obsessed with. And everything he does is like he says this, but he does this. And he does this but he says this. It's all twisted around and backwards. She's not really sure who he is or what he does, but she likes it."

"Uh oh. I don't think that I can tell who it [the person "Mr. James Dean" references] is, but it was definitely an experience that I went through that was interesting and I learned a lot from that time in my life. I think the song is very funny when I think about it."

"I love the song ["Haters"]. I wrote it, it was my idea. I think at the time I was feeling like I had to talk so much about my personal life because people make accusations and there are lies and rumors constantly. I think that song really just came to me because I was feeling like people are so negative. They love to read what's coming out next on Page Six [of the New York Post] and I just felt like it was appropriate. I also felt like normal girls could relate to that, what with school and how people backstab each other and talk bad about each other and how much petty stuff goes on."

"So many people think that this album is showing a different side of me, but that's not really what it is. I think it's just more me this time because I got to really do it how I wanted to."

"On the second album I worked with a lot of people that I worked with on the Metamorphosis album. And when I worked on Metamorphosis I was so nervous and shy about going into the studio and working with people, they eventually toward the end made me feel so comfortable and so secure with myself. I loved working with them. I have a great relationship with them. I talk to them [all the time]. When we started talking about the second album, I was like, "I want to work with all the same people." They knew what was going on in my life, what I was going through. I would call them and say, "I feel like this right now. I want a song about this..." I never really felt like I had enough time to write my whole album and I don't know if I'm secure enough with myself to do that. But I wrote three songs on the album, one I wrote with my sister. It's so personal and these people really got what I was going through and how I feel inside. I think that's what makes it good and that's what makes me relate to them."

"What it talks about is stuff that I've gone through, like, in the past year, which is, you know, a lot, and some of it's good, and some of it's bad, and a lot of it's, like, a big learning experience. And I got to write a lot about that with people that I've worked with before, so I felt completely comfortable."

"Music is so personal to me. I can be myself, and say what I want to say. I feel I'm honest and don't try to hide things. But music enables people to learn about my personality, how I'm evolving. Even if I don't feel comfortable talking about something, I can feel comfortable expressing that same thing through my music."

"Compared to the first album, when I wasn't confident enough to make suggestions, this time around, I was very involved. I worked with the songwriters, telling them what was happening in my life, and what I wanted to sing about. If I thought it needed to be more heavy, more rock, I said so. I feel that this record is so much more me. I can't wait for people to hear it."

"...I want the songs I sing to reflect that [I am a regular 16 year old]. Basically, I'm not Lizzie McGuire anymore."

"No, I don't do that [sing about sex]. My music isn't forward like that. It's not sexual the way Britney's music is sexual. She feels comfortable singing about that, and that's fine, but I just don't talk about that kind of stuff, sorry. I just don't."

"Well, I'm not going to be singing about lollipops because I no longer relate to lollipops."

""Come Clean" is obviously about a boy and a girl's relationship and it's just talking about how somebody thinks they're in the dark. She's tired of it and he's tired of it and they're coming clean, whether it means they're gonna be together or not. They're laying all the cards out on the table and coming out with everything that hasn't been said basically. The video really shows that she's kind of in this monotone mood throughout the whole thing. She doesn't show too much emotion except that she's waiting for this boy, this guy, to come. You can't tell when they're running toward each other if they're gonna kiss or they're gonna hug or they're gonna hit each other. It's a bunch of different emotions."

"I actually didn't want to have control of the writing on my first album. To write, you have to have time to connect with yourself. I don't have that time right now, because I'm so busy."

"I love writing, but I feel like you need time to really get in touch with yourself to do that. On [Metamorphosis], I would have liked to have had more time to work with the writers [and] write some more of my own stuff. Hopefully I can do that on my second album."

"There are definitely people I respect and I love their music, but there was never really an artist that I said, "I want to be just like them, I love the way their career is going. I love their music." It wasn't really like that. I wanted to be like myself."

"Andre [Recke] and I and my mom worked very hard to really get good music that I related to and was age-appropriate for me and wasn't just cheesy pop stuff."

"Tea heads are gregarious, they are sensitive, and they are paranoiac. If you get to be known as a "drag" or a "bring down," you can't do business with them."

"Benway: Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?” “Nah I had to go relieve myself.” After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.” After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. That's one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eyes on the end of a stalk."

"The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host."

"Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror."

"I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence."

"Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand."

"The relation between an O.A. (Oblique Addict) and his R.C. (Recharge Connection) is so intense that they can only endure each other’s company for brief and infrequent intervals—I mean aside from recharge meets, when all personal contact is eclipsed by recharge process."

"Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face."

"“Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony."

"The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets."

"A functioning police state needs no police."

"Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside."

"Well as, one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot observe customary obscenities."

"America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting."

"Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --- Kid, it was tasty."

"I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers. . . . I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants—a body—after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is only the colorless no smell of death. . . . Nobody can breathe and smell it through pink convulsions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh"

"Shooting PG is a terrible hassle, you have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper—have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls ... So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish ... New Orleans is a dead museum. We walk around Exchange Place breathing PG and find The Man right away. It's a small place and the fuzz always knows who is pushing so he figures what the hell does it matter and sells to anybody. We stock up on H and backtrack for Mexico. Back through Lake Charles and the dead slot-machine country, south end of Texas, nigger-killing sheriffs look us over and check the car papers. Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, desert and mountains and vultures; little wheeling specks and others so close you can hear wings cut the air (a dry husking sound), and when they spot something they pour out of the blue sky, that shattering bloody blue sky of Mexico, down in a black funnel ... Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water."

"Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets."

"I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train..."

"If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it."

"The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite."

"Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh. Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke."

"When you give up junk, you give up a way of life. I have seen junkies kick and hit the lush and wind up dead in a few years. Suicide is frequent among ex-junkies. Why does a junky quit junk of his own will? You never know the answer to that question. No conscious tabulation of the disadvantages and horrors of junk gives you the emotional drive to kick. The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before."

"You sometimes wake up from a dream and think, "Thank God, I didn't really do that!" Reconstructing a period of blackout you think, "My God, did I really do that?" The line between saying and thinking is blurred. Did you say it or just think it?"

"Junk is an inoculation of death that keeps the body in a condition of emergency"

"Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness."

"Junk short-circuits sex. The drive to non-sexual sociability comes from the same place sex comes from, so when I have an H or M shooting habit I am non-sociable. If someone wants to talk, O.K. But there is no drive to get acquainted. When I come off the junk, I often run through a period of uncontrolled sociability and talk to anyone who will listen."

"Why does an addict get a new habit so much quicker than a junk virgin, even after the addict has been clean for years? I do not accept the theory that junk is lurking in the body all that time - the spine is where it supposedly holes up - and I disagree with all psychological answers. I think the use of junk causes permanent cellular alteration. Once a junky, always a junky. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit."

"Sodomy is as old as the human species."