“True Terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” – Allen Ginsberg

“Reading a great book is like going for a multi-day hike through a national park of language.”– Jeffrey McDaniel

“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images.  It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex.”– Susan Sontag

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” – Sinclair Lewis, 1935, "It Can't Happen Here"

“It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.”
– Ornette Coleman 

“All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.” – Alexis de Tocqueville

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” – Theodore Roosevelt

“I think as long as the USA has only one political party – the Republican Party, a branch of which calls itself the Democratic Party – we aren’t going to see a change of the current policy. It’s the end of the republic and the beginning of the empire.” – Susan Sontag

“Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.” – Elbert Hubbard

“Writers aren’t sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”  – Tom Stoppard

“Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is best.” – Frank Zappa

“All media and all politics are controlled by the great interlocking corporations, and that is why we may never discuss real politics as opposed to sex lives. What is real politics? In one sentence: Who collects what money from whom to give to whom to spend for what. This is the question that may not be asked in a militarized society where dissent is kept to the margins. Democracy? A form of government the U.S. has never tried. We began with a constitution created by well-to-do white males to protect their property. Others were later given the franchise but the original oligarchs and their avatars are still in place and none dares challenge them.” – Gore Vidal

“Nothing like a lot of distracting saber-rattling to get you to take your eyes off the shell with the pea under it.” – Molly Ivins

“Perhaps the ideal place to think about the literature of the last fifty years is in a library surrounded on all sides by rows of shelves well stacked with bound copies of old literary magazines. One can probably spend months there in some corner without being noticed, choking on dust, turning the yellowed, crumbling pages, lingering over some poem or story, and even sneak in Chinese food and an occasional bottle of wine to get rid of the blues.”– Charles Simic

“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”     – John Stuart Mill

“Well, I suppose there isn't probably much difference between a sex addict and a writer. But when it's behavior that anesthetizes–come to think of it, writing anesthetizes, doesn't it? Okay, there's no difference whatsoever.” – Chuck Palahniuk

“People read to be amused, to pass the time, or to be instructed. Now I never read to pass the time, I never read to be instructed; I read to be taken out of myself, to become ecstatic. I'm always looking for the author who can lift me out of myself.” – Henry Miller

“He’s the president of Europe and he’s talking to the dead. They’re the only ones who listen or believe a single word he says,” –Robyn Hitchcock

"This is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history... This is not normal government policy....What we have here is a form of looting." – George Akerlof, 2001 Nobel Prize Winner for Economics

“There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.” – Anais Nin

“My heart still belongs in Europe, and I find myself going back there more frequently now. And in the current political climate . . . I have a lot of friends that have left the country. There’s something happening here that is enormously dangerous and quite oppressive. Maybe it’s time to stand on that soapbox and put the word out, because there are becoming fewer and fewer options to speak out against what’s going on. And it has to be said.”– David Sylvian

It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. –Herman Goering, at the Nuremberg Trials

By creating a "poet-professor" middle class, the writing programs have played into the hands of poetry's traditional enemies: education and entertainment. The slams and open-mike readings are offsprings of, or reactions to, the creative writing classes and courses based on Norton anthologies. It is wonderful for students to have contact with writers but I continue to believe that such contact should not take place in workshops dominated by student work and response. All of a student's time in literature should be involved with getting a small percentage of it under his belt, and coming to terms with what, in my view, poetry is really about: the extending of human consciousness, making conscious the unconscious, creating a symbolic consciousness that in its finest moments overcomes the dualities in which the human world is cruelly and eternally, it seems, enmeshed. – Clayton Eshelman

"In terms of historical suffering—I mean invasion, bombardment, starvation, deportation, genocide, totalitarian oppression—America is a tyro. Our national experience, Vietnam included, has always been, for the majority of the population, one of action at a distance. We are recent; we lack generational sediment. What historical rhythm we have established does not include the shared memory of disaster, certainly in this century. We have not been cursed with the calamities that, for better or worse, bind individuals across lines of caste, class and family. We have known nothing like what the Poles experienced under the Nazi occupation, or the Russians under Stalin, or the Irish under the enduring British yoke. In America, the sufferings of individuals, whether Vietnam veterans or the socially disinherited (now known as 'the underclass'), have remained just that; and for that reason they have gone largely unrecognized. This is not because we lack the capacity for empathy. It's that we have no collective reference for grief, terror and privation. Private wounds elicit no larger public resonance: the individual's history has nothing in common with the tribal history." — Sven Birkerts

"All I can find of interest to say about my work is to mention the key role in the process of writing played by my subconscious. It knows far better than I what should be written and how it should sound in words." — Paul Bowles

"And so I have remained, in cruel pursuit of truth and excellence, an inhumane executioner of the bogus, an abomination to all but those few people who have overcome their aversion to truth in order to free whatever is good in them." — Louise Brooks

"The world is full of shipping clerks who have read the Harvard Classics." — Charles Bukowski

"To read until one no longer understands a single sentence. That alone is reading." — Elias Canetti

"To possess a telescope without its other essential half-the microscope-seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope." — Leonora Carrington

"Bullshit on all that artistic suffering, agonizing over the empty page, canvas . . . Anyone who agonizes over their work isn't a genius. Anyone who agonizes for a living is an idiot." — Jonathan Carroll

"I have a dog. He's called Success
Follows me wherever I run
Sometimes I call him Failure
He answers to either one." — Nick Cave

"All you have to do is try, with meaningful words, properly and effectively arranged, to honestly unroll your sentences and paragraphs, clearly, sensibly, just explaining what you're up to as well and as powerfully as you can. Let your ideas be understood without making them complicated or obscure. And see, too, if your pages can make sad men laugh as they read, and make smiling men even happier; try to keep simple men untroubled, and wise men impressed by your imagination, and sober men not contemptuous, nor careful men reluctant, to praise it . . . do this, and what you've accomplished will be no small affair." — Miguel de Cervantes, 1605

"When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball." — Raymond Chandler

"Thus, the arriving poet, university trained to begin with, joins a university faculty, publishes primarily in university subsidy, under university editorship, reads primarily the poetry and criticism that the universities sanction or have themselves developed, and when he publishes his own slim volume (quite possibly in a university press imprint) finds it reviewed for praise or damnation by universitymen in university magazines. — John Ciardi, 1956

"Art is not a pastime but a priesthood." — Jean Cocteau

"Whether or not books and other traditional literary technologies survive, the dominant medium in the foreseeable future will be electronic, digital, with the Internet the probable universal provider. I anticipate that literary artists will gravitate toward this powerful medium, but if they do not, if literature does not in fact find a place there, then the vast majority of the human race will simply do without it, and thus, whether the new generations know it or not, they (all of us) will be greatly impoverished." — Robert Coover

"Among poets, most rewards are reserved for con-artists and wheeler-dealers, or are fortuitous accidents." — Judson Crews, Poetry Now

"In the 1950's people looked out for each other, not just the writer for the writers, but all artists for each other. Money doesn't make up for that mutual aid. Instead, with each art struggling for a share of the Arts Endowment pie, we're pitted against each other. Or even among ourselves--a bunch of magazines competing for $800 from CCLM! It makes first for a cutthroat atmosphere, and second for a generation of poet bureaucrats." — Diane di Prima

"Biberkopf ist ein kleiner Arbeiter. Wir wissen, was wir wissen, wir habens teuer bezahlen mussen." — Alfred Doblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz

"What I'm saying is that you're doomed to write what you write. And you're doomed to either commercial success or artistic success. You can't say you're going to write well and going to have survival value. No one can guarantee survival value. After all, Dostoevsky sold extremely well. Hemingway sold well. The only thing is to be fascinated and interested and dedicated and enjoy the work you're doing." — William Eastlake

"An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, 'What I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things . . .' You have made what seems to you a meaningful pattern in this field of possibilities . . . This is why the curator, the editor, the compiler, and the anthropologist have become such big figures. They are all people whose job it is to digest things, and to connect them together." — Brian Eno

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling 'Kilroy was here' on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass." — William Faulkner

"My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer, I think, writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward." — F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Anything incomprehensible has a sexual significance to many people under 35." — Zelda Fitzgerald

"A poet is a nasty cur even when he isn't having a fit." — Ford Madox Ford

"To me, any novel which doesn't have something to say on the subject of whether and why the characters are authentic or unauthentic is difficult to take seriously. It is merely an entertainment." — John Fowles

"The writer is afraid of feelings that are not suited to publication; he takes refuge then in irony; all he perceives is considered from the point of view of whether it is worth describing, and he dislikes experiences that can never be expressed in words. A professional disease that drives many writers to drink." — Max Frisch, Montauk

"Will the wind ever remember
the names it has blown in the past?
And with its crutch, its old age and its wisdom
It whispers, 'No, this will be the last.' " — Jimi Hendrix

"As long as we are not chased from our words we have nothing to fear. As long as our utterances keep their sound we have a voice. As long as our words keep their sense we have a soul." — Edmond Jabès

"Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives but because it is life itself. From Christ to Freud we have believed that, if we know the truth, the truth will set us free: art is indispensable because so much of this truth can be learned through works of art and through works of art alone--for which of us could have learned for himself what Proust and Chekov, Hardy and Yeats and Rilke, Shakespeare and Homer learned for us? and in what other way could they have made us see the truths which they themselves saw, those differing and contradictory truths which seem nevertheless, to the mind which contains them, in some sense a single truth?" — Randall Jarrell

"Truly, truly, I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." — Jesus

"Literary talent in America has often been precocious, as many of our greatest novels were written by men around thirty--Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, and The Sot-Weed Factor while a few masterpieces were produced by writers even younger--The Sun Also Rises and Lie Down in Darkness; but never before have so many young writers seemed so professionally mature." — Richard Kostelanetz, The End of Intelligent Writing

". . . the recognition that really counts comes not from a writer's elders but from his chronological peers and successors." — Richard Kostelanetz

"Meaning is not in things but in between; in the iridescence, the interplay: in the interconnections; at the intersections, at the crossroads. Meaning is transitional as it is transitory, in the puns or bridges, the correspondence." — Mallarmé

"I tend to be close to Dr. Williams' idea that writing is a disease. If you can get along without it, you're really much better off. I have a hard time getting this across to other writers. When I finish a major work, I say, Thank God that's done, I don't ever want to have an idea again. I don't want to go through this ordeal again." — Paul Metcalf

"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there." — Henry Miller

"Writing is not a game played according to rules. Writing is a compulsive and delectable thing. Writing is its own reward." — Henry Miller

"To write must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deep ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse. A child has no need to write, he is innocent. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with the virus of his disillusionment. No man would set word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in." — Henry Miller, Sexus

"Piglet sidled up to Pooh behind.
'Pooh!' he whispered.
'Yes, Piglet?'
'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.' "
— A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason." — Novalis

"I have very little to say about short-story writing. It's one thing to write short stories and another thing to talk about writing them, and I hope you realize that your asking me to talk about story-writing is just like asking a fish to lecture on swimming. The more stories I write, the more mysterious I find the process and the less I find myself capable of analyzing it." — Flannery O'Connor

"Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week's. Different books--same reviews." — John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

"People who say they love poetry and don't buy any are a bunch of cheap sons-of-bitches." — Kenneth Patchen

"The possibilities open to one are infinite. So why not do something Shakespeare, and Doestoevski and Faulkner didn't do, for after all they are nothing more than dead writers, members of this and that tradition, much-admired busts on a shelf. A dead writer may be famous but he is also dead as a duck, finished." — Walker Percy

Those who think of themselves as supporters of the arts seldom support the literary arts as they do the ballet companies, orchestras, or museums. Reading a magazine--even one with a track record like Kenyon Review or Ploughshares--doesn't score a person a lot of points. It's not a members-only gala or an opening night; it's something you can do in your pajamas! And yet, the literary magazines are the presenters and preservers of a major art form--perhaps the major art form, for what distinguishes us from the so-called beasts if not our ability to shape and manipulate language? The literary magazines are the stages and museums presenting the great authors of this century. Every young writer publishing for the first time does so in the pages of a little magazine; what new Eliot is languishing on the pages of Io or Chelsea or River Styx for lack of readers? . . . . If literary magazine publishing isn't a major art form, I'd like to know what is. — Carol J. Pierman

"Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated--the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived--is literature. . . ." — Marcel Proust

"Don't do anything but write." — Raymond Queneau

"In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye suggested that over decades and centuries genres go through seasonal cycles, evolving from romance in their spring to comedy in their summer to tragedy and realism in their fall and then to two things in their winter. First, the forms become ironic; they play against their own characters, their own worlds, their own ideas. 'Oh,' one character says to another. I wouldn't this be great if it happened in a novel!' Self-reflexive preciosity was a marvel when Laurence Sterne did it in Tristram Shandy but it has become a mental twitch in our 'postmodernist' age. We see it everywhere as characters wink at the camera, tweak their own antecedents, and invite us to laugh both at the present and the past of the worlds of art. This is bitter, although often funny, but it is becoming tedious indeed. Second, Frye suggested, genres return to myth, to the stories that found worlds, that create the very landscapes within which, later, we may find romance, and then comedy, and tragedy. And modern, or even postmodern, myth, it seems to me, need not be tedious. I point to Finnegans Wake." — Eric Rabkin

". . . tend to view Washington and the government--they cannot tell the difference--as monstrous, murderous and dumb." — Paul Richard

"Psychologically we are attuned only to what we grow up with; the experiments of strict contemporaries possess a transferable or contagious quality which flows in our blood. Few people can project this receptivity on to the next generation." — W.G. Rogers

"Every writer should grab hold of the nettle of reality; and then show it all: the muddy black roots; the viperous poison-green stalk; the gaudy flower(y pot)." — Arno Schmidt

"No great writers have emerged from writing school and probably none ever will." — Harry Smith, Small Press Review

"You only add books, you never subtract or divide them and any book that is printed is a book. It is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken, otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do, you completely do. I always do. I always remember all the detail in the book, no matter what the book is and therefore it is necessary to begin it at the beginning to lose myself in it when I read it again, just as I had to when I read it first." — Gertrude Stein

"It does appear, on present and manifestly preliminary evidence, as if certain electro-chemical and neuro-chemical processes of mental life might be "semantically" structured. Sensory input, storage, scanning, and subsequent response seem to occur in some kind of syntactical sequence; neither the neuro-chemistry of the human brain nor any human language seems to contain what modern linguists call "structure-independent operations." This may be an important clue. There seems to be, in a sense more than imagistic, a
grammar of life-processes, an organic templet from whose sequential organization and genetic activity in man language naturally arises. Language, in turn, reacts on, feeds back to, its physiological matrix. Or, to put it another way, the use of language of itself activates the substratum of linguistic potentiality. More and more synapses, more and more fibers of interrelation are woken into being. In the use of metaphor-a fact of language which Plato recognized as somehow crucial to human excellence--the neuro-physiological and the verbal seem to touch very closely. Metaphor ignites a new arc of perceptive energy. It relates hitherto unrelated areas of experience; such new relation may have a direct organic counterpart as hitherto separate centers of memory and scanning in the cortex are brought 'into circuit.' " — George Steiner

"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home." — Twyla Tharp

"I've always admired stylists. I put the writers of bumphable, ready-to-wear prose, calculated to sell, guaranteed not to shock, in the same category as artists who can't draw. There is a lack of bravery and a lot of fraud in them. I have tried never to write a book that didn't attempt something new in the way of narrative technique. Writing is an assault on cliche. I find little to admire in writers who make no attempt at originality." — Alexander Theroux

"I wish you'd buy more books." — Mark Twain, (Huck Finn to Tom Sawyer)

"Stupidity and poetry. There are subtle relations between these two categories. The category of stupidity and that of poetry," — Paul Valery

"Much contemporary literature, and much literature at any time, seems totally thoughtless--the authors don't write as though they had a brain; they fail to take seriously all the beautiful and painful and thoughtful things that great writers deal with--in tragedy and in comedy. Those two things add up to all there is." — Mark Van Doren

"There's a world going on underground." — Tom Waits

"Language means less and less. It's been systematically strangled through technological misuse and cliche. We're entering into silence--the most noisy, chaotic silence. It seems to be dawning on the Western world that there really is not much we can say about anything, especially the prime movers--birth, existence, sex, death. Nature is certainly out of bounds for everyday language. But it is possible to indicate something about them through certain types of literature, poetry, and song; it's a question of edge work--a touch here or there--of very careful treading, until it reaches a kind of concentrated, formless, form." — Scott Walker

"An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the terror of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition." — Evelyn Waugh

"One can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small things." — Edith Wharton

"The fault lines dividing the academic from the nonacademic, the capitalist from the anticapitalist, are not the only fractures that presently threaten the vitality of contemporary fiction. The most decisive issue concerns the rancorous split between the commercial presses and the independent presses. Since that blip on the screen which was the moment of the counterculture, when the American postmodern fiction canon--Barth, et al.--was established, the New York commercial publishing houses have, by keeping faith with their accountants only, jeopardized the meaningfulness of the literary past and the very possibility for a literary future. Marx once said that one of the principal products of capitalism was stupidity. The shit that has regularly cascaded from New York in the course of the last twenty years has performed admirably its task of keeping people stupid. What pride can be taken in a line which has given us Moral Fiction, Minimalism, the Literary Brat Pack, and now Generation X? Commercial publishing has, perhaps, not been as single-minded in this task as has television, but books have offered no one solace for, let alone an alternative to, the egregious cretinism of mass culture." — Curtis White

"A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist." — Oscar Wilde

" . . . we found great systems on the imagination and never trust to the hierarchies of the imagination itself." — William Carlos Williams

"There are three things important in life: honesty, which means living free of the cunning of the mind; compassion, because if we have no concern for others, we are monsters; and curiosity, for if the mind is not searching, it is dull and unresponsive." — Beatrice Wood