Pablo > Pablo's Quotes

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.”
― Why The Lucky Stiff

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Or like just another manipulative pseudopomo Bullshit artist who’s trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimention and commenting on the fiasco itself. (p. 158)”
― David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The shades of difference between other people and me serve to make variety and prevent monotony, but that is all; broadly speaking, we are all alike; and so by studying myself carefully and comparing myself with other people, and noting the divergences, I have been enabled to acquire a knowledge of the human race which I perceive is more accurate and more comprehensive than that which has been acquired and revealed by any other member of our species. As a result, my private and concealed opinion of myself is not of a complimentary sort. It follows that my estimate of the human race is the duplicate of my estimate of myself.”
― Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2: The Complete and Authoritative Edition (Autobiography of Mark Twain series)

“I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.”
― Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

“My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.”
― George Eliot

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Next to music, beer was best.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z. Or say for verisimilitude the Balloygan Road. That dear old back road. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road in lieu of nowhere in particular. Where no truck anymore. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road on the way from A to Z.”
― Samuel Beckett, Company

“Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Against Human Rights

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano

“The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“[Uncentering the Earth] itself is uncentering in the best possible way. Vollmann is one of the deepest, most fully ensouled writers alive.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Do you ever think anything you don't say?”
― Bart Simpson's Girlfriend

“This is why, when we have been particularly impressed by a book, we feel the need to talk about it; we do not want to get away from it by talking about it—we simply want to understand more clearly what it is in which we have been entangled. We have undergone an experience, and now we want to know consciously what we have experienced. Perhaps this is the prime usefulness of literary criticism—it helps to make conscious those aspects of the text which would otherwise remain concealed in the subconscious; it satisfies (or helps to satisfy) our desire to talk about what we have read.”
― Wolfgang Iser

“This machine kills fascists.”
― Woody Guthrie

“All this talking all the time, and the air fills up until there's nothing left to breathe.”
― Isaac Brock

“The oppressed peoples of the earth are not objects for the exquisite turmoil of European consciences. They are subjects from which to learn how to exercise political intelligence and action. Obviously, colonial arrogance is a long time dying.”
― Alain Badiou, Cinema

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Do as you like, a minimal maxim, an old favorite of mine, so exalting and at the same time so difficult as a Rabelesian rule. I hold the liberation
theory that the best writers liberate the language from taboos, tattoos, cockatoos, repetitions, old fashion repressions and expressions, clichés, fetters, and so forth. For this reason I call it sometimes liberature for short, this liberating literature.”
― Julián Ríos

“I am the great test! a blackened shadow-boxing colossus jabjabbered, pounding his gloves against the wall. The heavyweight will be quillweight. Bantamweight, even. Ain't nobody can dethrone me, beyond my ken! he boasted,* sidling up to his shadow.


*Mad Ali?:”
― Julián Ríos

“I see myself as traditional even though I know you see my work as experimental. I don’t really consider Sterne, Joyce, and Proust experimental either because the tradition of their writing goes back a long way. Traditional. The Grand Tradition. Clear back to “Don Quixote.” I never decided to write in a “new way” at all. It’s realism that’s fairly new. Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?”
― Marguerite Young