“That’s what’s curious when people say, of writers, This one’s a realist, this one’s a surrealist, this one’s a super-realist, and so forth. In fact, everybody’s a realist offering true accounts of the activity of mind. There are only realists.”
– Donald Barthelme, “The Art of Fiction N° 66” by J.D. O’Hara, The Paris Review 80 (Summer 1981)
“I kind of hope that somebody goes up there one of these days and cleans them up.”
– Neil Armstrong on leaving his footprints on the moon
“I’ve always been fascinated by the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car.”
– J. G. Ballard, Crash!, Dir. Harley Cokliss, BBC2 (1971)
“D’une certaine façon, moins il y a de moi dans un livre, plus je suis satisfait.”
– Jean-Jacques Schuhl, “Je me revendique ajusteur, monteur, plutôt qu’auteur” by Nathalie Crom, Télérama 3130 (9 January 2010)
“Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men Look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”
– John Berger, “Women in Art,” Ways of Seeing, BBC 1972
“I reserve the right to leave everything a little ragged, as if it (“everything”) knows better than I do how to be a book. If I tuck in all the corners, make it too tidy, it strains for perfection without allowing for the real perfection of the irreducible. I’m not saying I achieved that. But one must have goals.”
– Rachel Kushner, “A Psychotic Pattern of No-Pattern: A Conversation with Rachel Kushner,” Interview by Dana Spiotta, Tin House 59 (2014)
“For perhaps human perception itself is a long take, a lifespan unfolding in real time, punctuated by cuts and fade-outs that take the form of blinking and sleeping and forgetting.”
– Nicholas Rombes, 10/40/70: Constraint As Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory, 2014
“I do think something is lost today in the easily availability of films and music, and that’s the ability to misremember, or to forget. I’m not even sure why this seems important, but it does. Maybe there’s something about the distortion that comes with memory; there’s something valuable in the imaginative misremembering of our pasts which, relentlessly documented and archived now, live on in zombie-like ways in the present. That gap between the way things really were and the way we remember them to be is closing. If I had a gun against truth I’d use it every day.”
– Nicholas Rombes, Interview, Two Dollar Radio 7 January 2014
“The thing taken from you is your gift.”
– Gordon Lish (via)
“Everything seems to have changed and yet everything is essentially the same. Think of the surface of a fast-flowing gurgling stream, the way a single bubble within the foam breaks as it spins, breaks into tiny drops then joins again to form a tiny current and goes on its way. I watch the drops and try to concentrate on a single one. It’s impossible. There is no drop. Somehow there is only the whole that is at every instant different and yet the same. But the whole does not exist. Nor do the parts. So what is there? There is a changelessness that is always changing. It is beyond grasping..”
– László Krasznahorkai, “Interview With László Krasznahorkai” by George Szirtes, The White Review September 2013
ANDREW GALLIX 