Billy Sharplin > Billy's Quotes

“Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who you really were.
The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.”
― Martin Amis

“The militant Utopian, the perfectibilizer, from the outset, is in a malevolent rage at the obvious fact of human imperfectibility.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“There are several accounts, written or deposed, by the guards, executioners and inhumers of the Romanovs. One of the inhumers said that he could 'die in peace because he had squeezed the Empress's -----.'*

*Pipes's note reads: 'Deposition by P. V. Kukhtenko in Solokov Dossier I, dated September 8, 1918; omission in the original.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Some junk novels were all about airports. Some junk novels were even called things like Airport. Why, then you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? …Junk novels have been around for at least as long as non-junk novels, and airports haven’t been around for very long at all. But they both really took off at the same time. Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“As for me, I'm a gurgling wizard of calorific excess.”
― Martin Amis

“After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship--marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest.”
― Martin Amis

“For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I’d lost with my mother. Everything about her was a snowstorm of fascination,”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I blinked at her. My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone’s life when character is fixed forever;”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Never do what you can’t undo.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“My life has been the polar opposite of safe, but I am proud of it and so is my son, and that is good enough for me. I would do it all over again without changing the beat, although I have never recommended it to others. That would be cruel and irresponsible and wrong, I think, and I am none of those things.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again... ”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

“The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era--but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

“It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“Then I noticed, in all my pain and sickness,what music it was that like crackled and boomed on the
sound-track, and it was Ludwig van, the last movement of the
Fifth Symphony, and I creeched like bezoomny at that. "Stop!"
I creeched. "Stop, you grahzny disgusting sods. It's a sin, that's
what it is, a filthy unforgivable sin, you bratchnies!”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Oh, era suntuoso, y la suntuosidad hecha carne. Los trombones crujían como láminas de oro bajo mi cama, y detrás de mi golová las trompetas lanzaban lenguas de plata, y al lado de la puerta los timbales me asaltaban las tripas y brotaban otra vez como un trueno de caramelo. Oh, era una maravilla de maravillas. Y entonces, como un ave de hilos entretejidos del más raro metal celeste, o un vino de plata que flotaba en una nave del espacio, perdida toda gravedad, llegó el solo de violín imponiéndose a las otras cuerdas, y alzó como una jaula de seda alrededor de mi cama. Aquí entraron la flauta y el oboe, como gusanos platinados, en el espeso tejido de plata y oro. Yo volaba poseído por mi propio éxtasis, oh hermanos.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Me, me, me. How about me? Where do I come into all this? Am I like just some animal or dog? Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“The thrill of theft, of violence, the urge to live easy - is it worth it when we have undeniable proof, yes, yes, incontrovertible evidence that hell exists?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

“I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, BAGOMBO SNUFF BOX.

“If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Do you realize that all great literature — "Moby Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "The Iliad and The Odyssey," "Crime and Punishment," the Bible, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" — are all about what a bummer it is to be a ...human being?”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand—passive resistance and open displays of contempt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“I've been in several car accidents, but I can say that they did nothing for my libido.”
― J.G. Ballard

“Most known motives are so suspect these days that I doubt whether the hidden ones are any better. All the same,”
― J.G. Ballard, The Drought

“He turned his back on his mother, but the dead battlefield surrounded him on everyside. Deliberately scuffing his polished shoes, he kicked the cartridge cases at the sleeping soldiers.

I cupped my hands over my ears, trying to catch the sound that would wake them.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women

“You know, Dag and Claire smile a lot, as do many people I know. But I always wondered if there is something either mechanical or malignant to their smiles, for the way they keep their outer lips propped up seems a bit, not false, but protective. A minor realization hits me as I sit with the two of them. It is the realisation that the smiles that they wear in their daily lives are the same as the smiles worn by people who have been good-naturedly fleeced, but fleeced nonetheless, in public and on a New York sidewalk by card sharks, and who are unable because of social conventions to show their anger, who don't want to look like poor sports.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does.”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet