Harry > Harry's Quotes

“The most amusing thing about a pantomime horse is the necessity of having to shoot it twice.”
― Steve Aylett, Bigot Hall: A Gothic Childhood

“The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn't look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser.”
― Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."

[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]”
― Jim Jarmusch

“It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.”
― Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

“Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider The Lobster: Essays and Arguments

“A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and self-honesty are, in fact, so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that he other camps are either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.”
― Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art

“It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist

“This is what it means to be human: slaughtering the people we might have been. Metaphor or reality, abstract quantum formalism or flesh-and-blood truth, there’s nothing I can do to change it.”
― Greg Egan, Quarantine

“This is the first thing I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.”
― Philip Larkin

“I knew books could see people around them, they ground their tiny teeth, tried to rattle like windows, stories to tell.”
― Steve Aylett, Shamanspace

“How many times does a man have to shave before his chin gets the message?
”
― Steve Aylett, Slaughtermatic

“The optimist sees the future as a rabbit sees the oncoming truck - getting bigger, not closer.”
― Steve Aylett

“In America, fundamentalist Christians believe the world was created 6,000 years ago - in England people drink in bars that are older than that.”
― Steve Aylett

“Gun stripping is the tea ceremony of America.”
― Steve Aylett, Toxicology

“Biting enemies seems to be acceptable in a surprisingly narrow range of circumstances, or so a ninja shouted at me once”
― Steve Aylett

“Scientists used to do an experiment whereby a dog’s repeated reward for performing a task was unaccountably replaced by punishment. The dog, knowing it would be penalized for doing well or doing badly, would become melancholic and inactive. This and other unforeseeable results were funded by taxing up to sixty percent of people’s earnings. People became strangely melancholic and inactive
”
― Steve Aylett

“Fractal litigation, whereby the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world resulted in a massive compensation claim on the other.”
― Steve Aylett, Slaughtermatic

“What’s that thing when someone gets a knock on the head and suddenly can’t remember anything about himself?’
Death,’ said the barman, his face a mask of disapproval.”
― Steve Aylett, The Crime Studio

“Ideas are self-replenishing, like snot”
― Steve Aylett, The Crime Studio

“On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death.”
― Steve Aylett

“...to him Marx and Rand were the same because he went by pant size”
― Steve Aylett, Toxicology

“I crept in to find my father with pennies on his eyes - and looking closer I saw they were made of foil-covered chocolate. Of course I stole and ate them. Magical guilt? Tell me about it”
― Steve Aylett

“Looking at this town with an honest eye was like biting into candy with a mouthful of cavities.”
― Steve Aylett, Atom

“Climbing into the treehouse, I engaged him in light conversation and hunted for signs of creativity. All I found was a brass rubbing of his ego.”
― Steve Aylett, Bigot Hall: A Gothic Childhood

“The play was made quite famous by a headline misprint in Variety reading OBSCENE PLAY ATTRACTS MASSIVE CROW.”
― Steve Aylett, Lint