Ryan > Ryan's Quotes

“If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep. (Puritans will object to the language in that sentence, and feminists to the organ, and neither will admire or even notice how it was phrased.)”
― William H. Gass, Finding a Form

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“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

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
― Herman Melville

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
― David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays

“Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.”
― Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

“What you can imagine depends on what you know.”
― Daniel Dennett

“I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind.”
― Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

“The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.”
― Walter Mosley

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“Paradox though it may seem - and paradoxes are always dangerous things - it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.”
― Hilary Mantel

“Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.”
― Fulton J. Sheen