Satirists From The United States

"I heard a noise, faint, monotonous, white."

"I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read...I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from."

"The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now."

"No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die."

"We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others. We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.”"

"He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation."

"I think fiction rescues history from its confusions."

"I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become."

"I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist."

"When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap."

"We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn’t the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life’s lived before it gets to the parlor door."

"I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure."

"New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American."

"After all, it is not where one washes one’s neck that counts but where one moistens one’s throat."

"Well, isn’t Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else — and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?"

"Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself."

"A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same."

"In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time."

"Destiny and history are untidy."

"Contemporary writers and artists praised her style, feared her tongue; she was a beauty, but a talented, acerbic, and powerfully intelligent one."

"A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself — and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?"

"Complex in her privacy, refusing to be controlled by an audience or pinioned to a single representation, she once told Henry Ramont of the New York Times, "I used to be invited by people who said, 'Get Djuna for dinner, she's amusing.' So I stopped it.""

"The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other’s bed, where the rival perfects the lover’s imperfections."

"I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pat."

"Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact."

"We watched her come with subtle fire And learned feet, Stumbling among the lustful drunk Yet somehow sweet. We saw the crimson leave her cheeks Flame in her eyes; For when a woman lives in awful haste A woman dies. The jests that lit our hours by night And made them gay, Soiled a sweet and ignorant soul And fouled its play."

"Somewhere beneath her hurried curse, A corpse lies bounding in a hearse; And friends and relatives disperse, And are not stirred."

"What turn of body, what of lust Undiced? So we've worshipped you a little More than Christ."

"Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations."

"One sees you sitting in the sun Asleep; With the sweeter gifts you had And didn't keep, One grieves that the altars of Your vice lie deep."

"There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole."

"Someday beneath some hard Capricious star — Spreading its light a little Over far, We'll know you for the woman That you are."

"What turn of card, what trick of game Undiced? And you we valued still a little More than Christ."

"We are adhering to life now with our last muscle — the heart."

"Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?"

"Ah God! she settles down we say; It means her powers slip away It means she draws back day by day From good or bad."

"The Seal, she lounges like a bride, Much too docile, there's no doubt; Madame Récamier, on side, (if such she has), and bottom out."

"The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment."

"Morbid? You make me laugh. This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid. Look at my life. Look at the life around me. Where is this beauty that I am supposed to miss? The nice episodes that others depict? Is not everything morbid? I mean the life of people stripped of their masks. Where are the relieving features? Often I sit down to work at my drawing board, at my typewriter. All of a sudden my joy is gone. I feel tired of it all because, I think, "What's the use?" Today we are, tomorrow dead. We are born and don't know why. We live and suffer and strive, envious or envied. We love, we hate, we work, we admire, we despise. … Why? And we die, and no one will ever know that we have been born."

"If Helen of Troy could have been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it is highly probable that her admirers would have been an entirely different class. It is the thing you are found doing while the horde looks on that you shall be loved for — or ignored."

"Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on."

"She was a spendthrift of the spirit, an American in Paris when, as Evelyn Waugh said, the going was good."

"One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it."

"A case could be made for Mr. Ellis as a covert moralist and closet sentimentalist, the best kind, the kind who leaves you space in which to respond as your predispositions nudge you, whether as a commissar or hand-wringer or, like me, as an admirer of his intelligence and craft."

"That doesn't sound like...the Jayster."

"And now the missing Boy Scout inevitably provoked the flicker of worry I experienced every morning before Robby and Sarah went off to school, especially if the hangover was bad or I'd had too much coffee. This wide-awake nightmare lasted no more than thirty seconds, a rapid montage that nonetheless required a Klonopin: a rampage at the school, "I'm so scared" being whispered over the cell phone, what sounds like firecrackers popping off in the background, the ricocheting bullet that hurls the second-grader to the floor,the random firing in the library, the blood sprayed over an unfinished exam, the red pools of it forming on the linoleum, the desk spattered with viscera, a wounded teacher ushering dazed children out of the cafeteria, the custodian shot in the back, the girl murmuring "I think I've been hit" before she faints, the CNN vans arriving, the stuttering sheriff at the emergency press conference, the bulletins flashing on TV screens, the "concerned" anchorman offering updates, the helicopters hovering, the final moments when the gunman places the Magnum in his mouth, the overcrowded hospital emergency rooms and the gymnasiums transformed into makeshift morgues, the yellow crime tape ribboned around an entire playground - and then, in the aftermath: the .22 rifle missing from the stepfather's cabinet, the journal recounting the boy's rejection and despair, a boy who took the teasing hard, the boy who had nothing to lose, the Elavil that didn't take hold or the bipolar disorder not detected, the book on witchcraft found beneath the bed, the X carved into his chest and the attempted suicide the month before, the broken hand from punching a wall, the nights lying in bed counting to a thousand, the pet rabbit found later that afternoon hanged from a hook in a small closet - and, finally, the closing images of the endless coverage: the flag at half-staff, the memorial services, the hundreds of bouquets and candles and toys that filled the steps leading up to the school, the bloody hand of a victim on the cover of Newsweek, the questions asked, the simple shrugs, the civil suits filed, the copycats, the reasons you quit praying. Still, the worst news comes out of your own child's mouth: "But he was normal, Dad - he was just like me.""

"I hear today's college women are 'prodigious.'" "Prodigious? Is that what you heard?" "Well, I read it in a magazine. It was something I wanted to believe." "The Jayster. Always a dreamer."

"You do an awfully good impression of yourself."

"She staggers over to the bathroom door and grabs the edge of it to balance herself and blood starts running down her legs in thin rivulets and when she lifts up the robe we both can see her underwear soaked with blood and she pulls it off, panicking, and suddenly a huge gush of blood expels itself from beneath the robe, splashing all over the bathroom floor.She gasps, a thick noise comes out of her throat and she doubles over, grabbing her stomach, then she screams. Looking surprised and still clutching her stomach, she vomits will staggering backwards, collapsing onto the bathroom floor. There are strands of tissue hanging out of her."

"I'm Christian Bale", Russel, says, taking [her hand]. "Oh right," she says. "Yeah, I thought I recognized you. You're the actor."