quotations

"No need to elaborate works-merely say something that can be murmured in the ear of a drunkard or a dying man."--E. M. Cioran

"Chance provides thoughts and chance sweeps them away: there is no art of keeping or getting them. A thought has escaped me. I wanted to write it down, but instead I write that it has escaped me."--Blaise Pascal

"He had a heart as big as one of Mae West's hips."--Raymond Chandler

"I am vexed that people should have thought so many things before me. I seem like a reflection. But perhaps some day I'll cause another man to repeat the same thing."--Remy de Gourmont

"What tiresome and laborious folly it is to write lengthy tomes, to expand in five hundred pages on an idea that one could easily propound orally in a few minutes. Better is pretending that the books exist already and offering a summary or commentary."--Georges Borges

"The true artist will write in, as it were, small leaps, on a hundred different subjects that surge unawares into his mind. In this way, nothing is forced. Everything has an unwilled, natural charm. One does not provoke: one waits."--Jules Renard

"Last night I wanted to get up. Dead weight. A leg hangs outside. Then a trickle runs down my leg. I allow it to reach my heel before I make up my mind. It will dry in the sheets, the way it did when I was Poil de Carotte."--ibid., the last entry in his journal.

"Liking to find, to write beginnings, he tends to multiply this pleasure: that is why he writes fragments: so many fragments, so many beginnings, so many pleasures (but he doesn't like the ends: the risk of the rhetorical clausule is too great: the fear of not being able to resist the last word)."--Roland Barthes

"'Why is there something rather than nothing?' the book asked, quoting Parmenedes. It was as if my eyes were opened. I could not stop looking at my fellow passengers. How incredible, I thought, all of us being here, existing." --Charles Simic

"What is curious to me is that we are no longer astonished at being alive. Wonder is getting to be a rare emotion."--ibid.

"People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images."--Renee Magritte

"My sense of time. I send a toy to one of my godsons. He had just been made a colonel."--Jean Cocteau

"Have fun; if not, you'll bore us."--Marcel Duchamp

"Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself."--ibid.

"I was paying the price of my submission. How many of us are there who have within us neither a demon strong enough to thrust us on into adventure nor yet a good angel wise enough to keep us to the beaten track; and who drag a nostalgia for our boyhood dreams throughout our lives?"--Maurice Goudeket

"Until I receive proof that in the real struggle (that against time) I am bound to be defeated, I shall not permit myself to say that I have made a failure of my life. All the same. . . ."--Charles Baudelaire

"A complete work is not necessarily finished, a finished work is not necessarily complete."--ibid.

" . . . the enormous anal fruit of radial and shit-smeared raw pink meat . . ."--Georges Bataille

"The thought of suicide is a great comfort. It's helped me through many a bad night."--Friedrich Nietzsche

""The people one day applauded him, which caused Phocion to remark: 'Have I said something stupid?'""--Albert Camus