Alan Kapelner > Quotes

“The other night I thought, what a rich yet damn panicky experience it must be for writers to see strangers read what they've written. Then I thought, in a hell of a daily economic struggle to pay rent and eat and stay afloat in a money-worshipping world that wouldn't give men of non-conforming spirit and dreams the right time of day, what a rough tough lonely job serious writers have. To make points, to make ideas stick in hope of re-routing minds, to go all-out for tries to change a world with just pens, they've got to just about rape people with words. Same time it seems to me too many writers write as if they were committing acts of espionage. When reading their work, it always seems they've spied on and stole some great writer's state secrets. I think a writer should be enslaved to no dead or living writing god. He should create strictly from his own personality. His signature should be so deeply his own. If he should fail in this, the fault would be his, never that of the god. If he should succeed, this success would be all his own, his victory, and the victory would be all the greater and sweeter because of it.”
― Alan Kapelner, All the Naked Heroes: A Novel of the Thirties

“Away deep in the aim to study himself in the school of the land his ancestors' gravestones flowered, Rip planned to burn his oil on the journey for growth by the hike, the thumb, the hitch, the rod, the freight, the rail, and he x'd New York on a map and pencilled his way to and into and through and under and up and between and over and across states and capitals and counties and cities and towns and villages and valleys and plains and plateaus and prairies and mountains and hills and rivers and roadways and railways and waterways and deserts and islands and reservations and titanic parks and shores and, ocean across to ocean and great lakes down to gulfs, Rip beheld the west and the east and the north and the south of the Brobdingnagian and, God and Christ and Man, it was a pretty damn good grand big fat rash crass cold hot pure mighty lovely ugly hushed dark lonely loud lusty bitchy tender crazy cruel gentle raw sore dear deep history-proud precious place to see, and he sure would, he thought, make the try to see it and smell it and walk and ride and stop and talk and listen in it and go on in it and try to find and feel and hold and know the beliefs in it and the temper and the talents in it and the omens and joys and hopes and frights and lies and laughs and truths and griefs and glows and gifts and glories and glooms and wastes and profits and the pulse and pitch and the music and the magic and the dreams and facts and the action and the score and the scope and span of the mind and the heart and spine and logic and ego and spirit in the soul and the goal of it.”
― Alan Kapelner, All the Naked Heroes: A Novel of the Thirties

“The sky belched. The thunder of one more belch cracked the dark morning and the air became clogged with the twisting speed of the rain that beat the streets in a unified tempo of a thousand small drums. Skinny walked slowly, slowly in the gutter. All of him, all of his possessions stuck out. One more clap of thunder stuttered insanely and Skinny scoffed at the scattering people and the mad hunt for shelter. Some huddled in doorways and some huddled under awnings and some made reluctant purchases for the franchise of being legitimate fugitives from the prison of the rain. Skinny and his big wet head was a flawless model for a tragic cartoon as the people fled from the streets and he just wandered in the gutter where the rain spilled over him and sucked his body.”
― Alan Kapelner, Lonely Boy Blues

“A stucco of agony clothed her mind when she thought of having to go home to see her mother, a frail compound of maudlin substance. Someone shut the warm faucet in her body and she quaked in the wind. A man on his motorcycle tooted his horn and she heard a boy call his father a jerk.”
― Alan Kapelner, Lonely Boy Blues