Self Referential Quotes

“And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile — except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison.”
― Isaac Asimov, Murder at the ABA

“A mirror mirroring a mirror”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I wish my wish would not be granted!”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“I enjoy acronyms. Recursive Acronyms Crablike "RACRECIR" Especially Create Infinite Regress”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“Please, Oh please, publish me in your collection of self-referential sentences!”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

“Life is fundamentally a mental state. We live in a dream world that we create. Whose life is truer, the rational man of action pursuing practical goals of personal happiness and wealth or the philosophic man who lives in a world of theoretical and metaphysical ideas? We ascribe the value quotient to our lives by making decisions that we score as either valid or invalid based upon our personal ethics and how we think and behave.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Why our poet chose to give his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear.”
― Nabokov Vladimir, Pale Fire

“This computer-generated pangram contains six a's, one b, three c's, three d's, thirty-seven e's, six f's, three g's, nine h's, twelve i's, one j, one k, two l's, three m's, twenty-two n's, thirteen o's, three p's, one q, fourteen r's, twenty-nine s's, twenty-four t's, five u's, six v's, seven w's, four x's, five y's, and one z.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

“Advertising that makes fun of itself is so powerful because it
implicitly congratulates both itself and the viewer (for making the joke and
getting the joke, respectively).”
― David Foster Wallace

“In a sense it has been my way to transcendental experience: to the discovery that matter metaphorically speaking, is the creation of the spirit (the mode of existence of the observer in a domain of discourse), and that the spirit is the creation of the matter it creates. This is not a paradox, but it is the expression of our existence in a domain of cognition in which the content of cognition is cognition itself. Beyond that nothing can be said.”
― Humberto R. Maturana, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living

“The mind is matter in and of itself, but I don't mind, and it doesn't matter.”
― Zenfex

“Here is a story in the worst way. I have no business being anywhere in it. It comes between me and the life I have coming.”
― Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“The truth was she wouldn't trade Roland's world for anything. Its silent mystery and empty spaces were intoxicating.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“Of Books and Scribes there are no end:
This Plague--and who can doubt it?
Dismays me so, I've sadly penned
Another book about it.”
― Robert W. Service, The Pretender: A Story of the Latin Quarter

“A second way of interpreting Baudrillard’s hyperreality can therefore be found in his critique of the sign where consumer society, in its unstoppable process of deterritorialization, reduces objects to signs and the latter to empty signifiers. Hyperreality can eventually be understood as the pathway leading from a condition where the sign bears some semblance to reality to one where the sign becomes self-referential.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“Who in the hell was Halliday? Just a guy from out of town who’d written a few bad mystery novels. Really a has-been. Still trying to ride along on the hard-boiled stuff that had gone out of favor with the old Black Mask.”
― Brett Halliday, She Woke to Darkness

“She was a good if sloppy writer.”
― Jilly Cooper, Riders

“As our heroes press on down the tunnel, the golden light grows ever brighter with every corner they turn. What can be its source? Whence comes this beauteous luminescence? What treasure can it betoken? And most importantly of all, who writes this stuff? I mean, really, 'beauteous luminescence'?”
― Jonathan Trueman, The Treacle People: Still Sticky