Barney Rowell > Barney's Quotes

“McVries opened his eyes and smiled again.
The next instant
He was gone.”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“The sea at the horizon was yet unchanged. It glittered blue and ageless, full of dancing points and nets of light in the late afternoon sun.”
― Richard Bachman, The Running Man

“Die Definition eines Arschlochs ist ein Mensch, der nicht glaubt, was er sieht.”
― Richard Bachmann

“If you think someone is seriously on the prod for your ass, it keeps you awake.”
― Richard Bachman, Stephen King, Thinner

“Getting old is like driving through snow that just gets deeper and deeper. When you finally get in over your hubcaps, you just spin and spin. That’s life. There are no plows to come and dig you out. Your ship isn’t going to come in, girl. There are no boats for nobody. You’re never going to win a contest. There’s no camera following you and people watching you struggle. This is it. All of it. Everything.”
― Richard Bachman, Roadwork

“Vielleicht gab es nicht mal einen Regenbogen, geschweige denn einen Topf mit Gold.”
― Richard Bachman, The Running Man

“Was he an alcoholic? What was that? Someone who drinks all the time? Who can't say no to a drink? Who drinks in secret? Somebody who anticipates the next drink before he's finished with the one in front of him?”
― Irvine Welsh, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

“—Everybody talks about being a writer, angel. If every novel conceived on a bar stool made it into print, there would not be one tree left standing on God’s green Earth.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins: A Novel

“His friends will decline in their numbers as his needs increase. The inverse, or perverse, mathematics ay life.”
― Irvine Welsh

“Ah sortay jist laugh whin some cats say that racism's an English thing and we're aw Jock Tamson's bairn up here . . . it's likesay pure shite man, gadges talkin through their erses.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“Some people spend years in counselling trying to cope with being fucked up. I just move on. The fucked-upness always goes. The conventional wisdom is that you're running away, you should learn to cope with being fucked-up. I don't hold with that. Life is a dynamic rather than a static process, and when we don't change it kills us. It's not running away, it's moving on.”
― Irvine Welsh, Glue

“Jim has a nice life, he considers, but sometimes Frank has a hell of a lot more fun.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Blade Artist

“The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I tiger can smile
A snake will say it loves you
Lies make us evil”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Blood and bodies and death and power.”
― Martin Amis, Time's Arrow

“But now it seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push.

Those forces – incomparably the most potent in our culture – have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdathon; a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go.

Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth’s poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics – his attitude toward the poor, say, or his unconscious ‘valorization’ of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, everyone has become a literary critic – or at least, a book-reviewer.”
― Martin Amis (Author), The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000

“In general, writers never find out how strong their talent is: that investigation begins with their obituaries. In the USSR, writers found out how good they were when they were still alive. If the talent was strong, only luck or silence could save them.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“The ad world used to be something of a refuge for literary types. But I feared for myself at J.W.T. It seemed to be entirely peopled by blocked dramatists, likeably shambling poets, and one-off novelists. The whole place felt like a clubworld sunset home for literary talent. ”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“And yet she was wholly herself: a rarity.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think, 'oh, I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you. ... You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entirely, an that's not even to mention the people separated from us by time -four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we're gone- it'll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but- a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray . . . Baa baa baa . . . Gentlemen songsters off on a spree . . . Doomed from here to eternity . . .”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But though it was the most resonant and real-seeming thing that had happened in a long time, I didn't want to spoil it by talking about it...”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Scott could feel the contents of his stomach flip over and over on themselves. He turned to the side and retched, frothy yellow bile spilled out onto the newspaper covered floor, filling the room with the putrid stench of previously ingested alcohol.

'Look's like someone can't hold their drink,' McBlane said, and Dominic and Shugg laughed.

Scott was still staring at the steam rising from his evacuated stomach contents as he heard the hammer fall. The dull crack of bone splintering under its weight.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“If your world is out there and you are in here then the only things that will gather within these walls are time and bitterness. Eventually, that bitterness will eat away at you and leave nothing behind but resentment and hate.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma...”
― R.D. Ronald

“The best writers tend to look the roughest in photos. At least that's the excuse I use for why I look so bad in mine.”
― R.D. Ronald

“There's no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I've started drinking my own urine. I laugh spontaneously at nothing. Sometimes I sleep under my futon. I'm flossing my teeth constantly until my gums are aching and my mouth tastes like blood. Before dinner last night at 1500 with Reed Goodrich and Jason Rust I was almost caught at a Federal Express in Times Square trying to send the mother of one of the girls I killed last week what might be a dried-up, brown heart. And to Evelyn I successfully Federal Expressed, through the office, a small box of flies along with a note, typed by Jean, saying that I never, ever wanted to see her face again and, though she doesn't really need one, to go on a fucking diet. But there are also things that the average person would think are nice that I've done to celebrate the holiday, items I've bought Jean and had delivered to her apartment this morning: Castellini cotton napkins from Bendel's, a wicker chair from Jenny B. Goode, a taffeta table throw from Barney's, a vintage chain-mail-vent purse and a vintage sterling silver dresser set from Macy's, a white pine whatnot from Conran's, an Edwardian nine-carat-gold "gate" bracelet from Bergdorfs and hundreds upon hundreds of pink and white roses.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho