MJ Nicholls

“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

“All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.”
― Gilbert Sorrentino

“And so, for me, the only fiction that still means something today is the kind of fiction that tries to explore the possibilities of fiction beyond its own limitations; the kind of fiction that challenges the tradition that governs it; the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man's intelligence and imagination rather than man's distorted view of reality; the kind of fiction that reveals man's playful irrationality rather than his righteous rationality.”
― Raymond Federman