MJ Nicholls

“This is a work of fiction.
If certain characters resemble people in real life, it is because certain people in real life resemble characters from a novel.
Nobody, therefore, is entitled to feel included in this book.
Nobody, by the same token, to feel excluded.”
― Fernando Del Paso, Palinuro de México

“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

“It is only the female half of the human race has been endowed with the powers to run the world. Only they are not understood, not recognized, and not cultivated by themselves, or by men, and are crassly trampled underfoot, and appropriated by the male half which is not capable of exercising these great powers, and in any case, out of sheer pride does not have the good sense to yield to them.”
― Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

“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