John Burdett > Quotes

“Your fear of letting go prevents you from letting go of your fear of letting go.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Tattoo

“You don't understand. I only prostitute the part of the body that isn't important, and nobody suffers except my karma a little bit. I don't do big harm. You prostitute your mind. Mind is seat of Buddha. What you do is very very bad. You should not use your mind in that way”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Tattoo

“Don't ask me when I first mastered the obvious.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok 8

“I don't want enlightenment, I want him. Sorry Buddha, I loved him more than you.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok 8: A Novel

“We do not look on death the way you do, farang. My closest colleagues grasp my arm and one or two embrace me. No one says sorry. Would you be sorry for a sunset?”
― John Burdett, Bangkok 8

“The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.”
― John Burdett

“The sound she is making is the sound hearts make after they're in
pieces and the fragments dissolve into the overwhelming sadness of the
universe. The power to hear it may be the only privilege of the
thoroughly dispossessed.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok 8

“Bangkok is one of the world's great cities, all of which own red-light districts that find their ways into the pages of novels from time to time. The sex industry in Thailand is smaller per capita because the Thais are less coy about it than many other people. Most visitors to the kingdom enjoy wonderful vacations without coming across any evidence of sleaze at all”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Tattoo

“On a whim, Pisit calls the monk back to ask what he thinks of all this, and Western culture in general. After his drubbing just now he is in a Zen-ish sort of mood, not to say downright sarcastic: 'Actually, the West is Culture of Emergency: Twisters in Texas, earthquakes in California, windchill in Chicago, drought, flood, famine, epidemics, war on everything - watch out for that meteor and how much longer does the sun really have? Of course, if you didn't believe you could control everything, there wouldn't be an emergency, would there?”
― John Burdett, Bangkok 8: A Novel

“I am moonlighting for the Buddha.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Haunts

“Lumpini Park at night: love at its cheapest, but the incidence of HIV is said to be over 60 per cent. In the darkness: furtive movement on benches and on the grass, muted moans and whispers, rustlings of large animals in heat, the intensity of the atomic fusion of sec and death (highly addictive, they say).”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Tattoo

“Bored with Pisit today, I switch to our public radio channel, where the renowned and deeply reverend Phra Titapika is lecturing on Dependent Origination. Not everyone’s cup of chocolate, I agree (this is not the most popular show in Thailand), but the doctrine is at the heart of Buddhism. You see, dear reader (speaking frankly, without any intention to offend), you are a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging, there is no center at all, everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the environment, your thoughts depend on whatever junk floats in from the media, your emotions are largely from the reptilian end of your DNA, your intellect is a chemical computer that can’t add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator, and even your best side is a superficial piece of social programming that will fall apart just as soon as your spouse leaves with the kids and the money in the joint account, or the economy starts to fail and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some idiot’s war, or they give you the news about your brain tumor. To name this amorphous morass of self-pity, vanity, and despair self is not only the height of hubris, it is also proof (if any were needed) that we are above all a delusional species. (We are in a trance from birth to death.) Prick the balloon, and what do you get? Emptiness. It’s not only us-this radical doctrine applies to the whole of the sentient world. In a bumper sticker: The fear of letting go prevents you from letting go of the fear of letting go. Here’s the good Phra in fine fettle today: “Take a snail, for example. Consider what brooding overweening self-centered passion got it into that state. Can you see the rage of a snail? The frustration of a cockroach? The ego of an ant? If you can, then you are close to enlightenment.”

Like I say, not everyone’s cup of miso. Come to think of it, I do believe I prefer Pisit, but the Phra does have a point: take two steps in the divine art of Buddhist meditation, and you will find yourself on a planet you no longer recognize. Those needs and fears you thought were the very bones of your being turn out to be no more than bugs in your software. (Even the certainty of death gets nuanced.) You’ll find no meaning there. So where?”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Tattoo

“without a war, America would descend into total confusion and would have to turn itself into a police state to survive, because its people no longer have any internal structure. Americans can never be defeated by war. It is peace they find intolerable.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Tattoo

“The greatest pleasure in life is to be understood, is it not? But who in the world does an artist like you or me find to understand”
― John Burdett, Bangkok 8

“Sincerity is the first casualty of capitalism. We”
― John Burdett, The Godfather of Kathmandu

“Farang, I'll bet you Wall Street against a Thai mango he'll be back, if for no other reason than to play the card of virile youth against Hudson's superior rank and thus restore his ego after that humiliating reprimand.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Tattoo

“To be frank, nothing has changed since The Quiet American—when we finally destroy the whole world it will be with the very best of intentions.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok 8

“But a craftsman is not necessarily an artist. He needs that something extra that only comes from the cold heart of the universe.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok 8

“The function of the West is to turn bodies and minds into products. It cannot understand that the rest of the world holds this to be an obscenity, a corruption of our nirvanic nature.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Haunts

“The loneliness of farangs can be a fatal disease which distorts their minds and tortures them until they snap.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok 8

“I am consciousness trapped in a pipe. Sometimes it’s hard to breathe.”
― John Burdett, [Bangkok Tattoo] (By: John Burdett) [published: July, 2006]

“In the twenty-first century the American ambassador works in a medieval castle. What is the karma of America?”
― John Burdett, Bangkok 8

“Buddhism was too subtle for him then, as it is today. To the evolved mind of the Gautama Buddha, any desire was an obscene distortion, even the desire for God. Mustafa is one of those passionate souls who were made for Islam, the warrior religion.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Tattoo

“Mitch Turner interested him a lot. Until he met Turner, I think he doubted that farang had souls. When he saw what a mess Turner was in, what he called the ‘great howl of agony’ at the center of this man, he felt he’d understood why the West is the way it is.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Tattoo

“Farangs don’t understand us Thais. They think if a girl sells her body, then she has no dignity, no limits. Actually, the opposite is often the truth. Women like your mother are very free spirits. Could you imagine Nong ever holding down a normal job? Or putting up with abuse from a man? A woman might sell her body because it’s more dignified and safer than being married to a violent drunk who goes whoring without protection.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok 8

“This government has no common sense at all. Do they seriously think we’ll get rich by becoming as sterile as the West? I’ve been to Paris, Florida, Munich, London—those places are museums populated by ghosts.”
― John burdett , Bangkok Tattoo

“Today Chanya is kikiat and won’t be doing any work of any kind. Kikiat is usually translated as “lazy,” which is misleading because of the disfavor into which this vital component of mental health has fallen in the work-frenzied Occident; over here kikiat is not a fault so much as a frank statement of the human condition. To fail to lend a helping hand because you have something more important to do may provoke anger in others, but to fail to perform a chore because you are feeling kikiat will, in all but the most extreme circumstances, meet with an understanding sigh; indeed, the word itself has a kind of pandemic effect, so that one person declaring themselves kikiat can cause a whole office to slow down. You may spend a lot of time over here, DFR, learn our customs, know our history better than we do ourselves, and even speak our language, but until you have penetrated to the very heart of indolence and learned to savor its subtle joy, you cannot claim really to have arrived. Naturally,”
― John Burdett, Vulture Peak: A Royal Thai Detective Novel (5)

“Mr”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Eight

“One does not become an outcast by birth, one does not become a Brahmin by birth. It is by deed that one becomes an outcast, it is by deed that one becomes a Brahmin.” The”
― John Burdett, The Godfather of Kathmandu

“Ideas’ is right. I hardly do any detailed design anymore, I have people who are better at it than I am. But a craftsman is not necessarily an artist. He needs that something extra that only comes from the cold heart of the universe.”
― John Burdett, Bangkok 8