MJ Nicholls

“What’s that dreadful phrase? Reader-friendly? It isn’t reader friendly; it’s saying to the reader, “I bet you can’t take this, and if you can you’re the kind of reader I want and you’ll stay with me. If you can’t take it, I don’t want you to read me anyway.”
― Paul West

“An artist in this nuthouse century is like a man running an obstacle race fitted out with all the gadgets of our riotous technology. He gets blown a mile into the air on a jet of liquid helium, shuttles about on little rocket tubes, plunges into the deeps of the ocean, shoots out again a hundred miles into the space while lurid sights and sounds shred his senses. Every year, every month, and ‘panoptic’ work appears and warps his consciousness into a new shape. Knowledge itself is in a molten, a plasmatic state and what titanic electromagnetic grip of intellect would be required to lock it solid long enough to reach artistic fusion point? The damned language becomes obsolete as it clatters from the typewriter.”
― Paul Ableman

“The most glorious ideas so often fail on the random cliff of tragic farce.”
― Mynona, My Papa and the Maid of Orléans and Other Grotesques

“Their hair belonged to some middle crinal zone between aseptic nord and latinindian jetwalled lousehouse.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Clockwork Testament, Or, Enderby's End