Paul > Paul's Quotes

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
― Pablo Picasso

“To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.”
― Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

“As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything. You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free. That nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you. You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, in almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions. You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing. You are invisible, limpid, transparent. You no longer exist. Across the passing hours, the succession of days, the procession of the seasons, the flow of time, you survive without joy and without sadness. Without a future and without a past. Just like that: simply, self evidently, like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing.”
― Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties / A Man Asleep

“You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they've been read...”
― Keri Hulme, The Bone People

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.”
― Brian Aldiss

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult.”
― Plutarch

“Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights

“I had always imagined, Westfield said, that one could either die tragically, cut short with much still to be done, or that one could die old and full of years, as the Bible has it, after having put one's house in order. I had never considered that there is a third alternative, in which one went on living and yet found no order in one's life, in which everything at the end was as confused and unfinished as it had always been.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg: Variations: A Literary Tapestry Where Past, Present, Imagination, and Truth Intertwine

“I am grateful to blessed Nature, because she made what is necessary easy to acquire and what is hard to acquire unnecessary.”
― Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia

“Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“Sometimes I am convinced that triangle is another name for stupidity, that eight times eight is madness or a dog.”
― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch