Pete Barlak > Pete's Quotes

“As so often when Mr Rhodes gets grateful and reverent, you have to read the sentence twice, even though you didn’t want to read it once.”
― Martin Amis, The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000

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

“I pay more tax registered in Holland than I would in the USA, but better gieing to the Dutch to build dams than the Yanks to build bombs.”
― Irvine Welsh, Dead Men's Trousers

“In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“No one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: …there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet." JG Ballard, 2004”
― J.G. Ballard

“The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“She says to me, but were we ever intimate? How intimate were we really? Sure, there were the ordinary familiarity-type things - our bodies, our bodily discharges and stains and seepages, an encyclopedic knowledge of each other's family grudges, knowledge of each other's early school yard slights, our dietary peccadilloes, our tv remote control channel-changing styles. And yet...

And yet?

And yet in the end did we ever really give each other completely to the other? Do either of us even know how to really share ourselves? Imagine the house is on fire and I reach to save one thing - what is it? Do you know? Imagine that I am drowning and I reach within myself to save that one memory which is me - what is it? Do you know? What things would either of us reach for? Neither of us know. After all these years we just wouldn't know. ”
― Douglas Coupland, Life After God

“To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.”
― Albert Camus

“Crowd was to be pleased. Crowd was to be worshipped and feared. Ultimately, Crowd was to be made sacrifice unto.”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“It's not about knowing who you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it.”
― Cormac Mccarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature.

She comes to me with the gift of song and in return I treat her with the respect I feel she deserves — in this case this means not subjecting her to the indignities of judgement and competition.”
― Nick Cave

“Candle is an X-ray, it's a matter of wavelength.”
― Craig Clevenger, Dermaphoria

“All my life I have felt a great kinship with the madman and the criminal. Practically all my life I have dwelt in big cities; I am unhappy, uneasy, unless I am in a big city. My feeling for Nature is limited to water, mountain and desert. These three form a trine which is more imperative, for me, than any spiritual alimentation. But in the city I am aware of another element which is beyond all these in power of fascination: the labyrinth. To be lost in a strange city is the greatest joy I know; to become oriented is to lose everything. To me the city is crime personified, insanity personified. I feel at home.”
― Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye

“I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

“That’s the thing I want to make clear about depression: It’s got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal—unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature’s part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel

“I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.”
― Arthur Koestler

“No one will ever know anyone. We just have to deal with each other. You're not ever gonna know me.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

“Committing to Nick, feeling safe with Nick, being happy with Nick, made me realize that there was a Real Amy in there, and she was so much better, more interesting and complicated and challenging, than Cool Amy. Nick wanted Cool Amy anyway. Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you? So that’s how the hating first began. I’ve thought about this a lot, and that’s where it started, I think.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. ”
― Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!

“Hely’s feelings didn’t run very deep; he lived in sunny shallows where it was always warm and bright.”
― Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

“Are you decent?" Richards asked.
"Yes!" she stormed. "isn't that why you picked on me? Because I was defenseless and... decent?"...
"If you're so decent, how come you have six thousand New Dollars to buy this fancy car while my little girls dies of flu?”
― Richard Bachman (Stephen King)

“Peace is the only battle worth waging.”
― Albert Camus

“nothing can save
you
except
writing.
it keeps the walls
from
failing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“I, the unfortunate Doctor Polyakov, who became addicted to morphine in February of this year, warn anyone who may suffer the same fate not to attempt to replace morphine with cocaine. Cocaine is a most foul and insidious poison. Yesterday Anna barely managed to revive me with camphor injections and today I am half dead.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, Morphine

“Back on shore everyone was pretty messed up, but the owner/captain was by far the worst off. He ended up drunk for a week, though the only thing he ever said was "So?"
The boat's gone. "So?"
Your mate's dead. "So?"
Hey at least you're alive. "So?"
An awful word but it does harden you.
It hardened me.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves