"Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire."
— J.G. Ballard

"...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable."
— J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms."
— J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again ... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul"
— J.G. Ballard

"Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography."
— J.G. Ballard

"Nothing is real until you put it in the VCR."
— J.G. Ballard

"Never work."
— Guy Debord

"If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force."
— Antonin Artaud (The Theater and Its Double)

"You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans. "
— Ronald Reagan

"One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk."
— Charles Baudelaire

"Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit."
— Guy Debord

"There seems to be an audience that demands everything be explained to them that everything be easy. And I don t think that s doing us any good as a culture. The ease with which we can accomplish or conjure any possible imaginable scenario through CGI is almost directly proportionate to how uninterested we re becoming in all of this. I can remember Ray Harryhausen s animated skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. I can remember Willis O Brien s King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because frankly I could have gotten someone a passerby on the street who could have gotten the same effect if you d given them half a million dollars to do it. It removes artistry and imagination and places money in the driver s seat and I think it s a pretty straight equation—that there is an inverse relationship between money and imagination. "
— Alan Moore

"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."
— Italo Calvino

"“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”"
— Italo Calvino

"What happened to fantasy for me is what also happened to rock and roll. It found a common denominator for making maximum money. As a result, it lost its tensions, its anger, its edginess and turned into one big cup of cocoa."
— Michael Moorcock

"The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space."
— Georges Bataille

"I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction. "
— Georges Bataille

"But a sort of rupture-in anguish-leaves us at the limit of tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond."
— Georges Bataille

"What do you despise? By this are you truly known."
— Frank Herbert

"Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world."
— Walt Disney Company

"Fantasy, if it's really convincing, can't become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time."
— Walt Disney Company

"I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known."
— Walt Disney Company

"It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening."
— H.G. Wells

"If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it."
— H.G. Wells

"I've dreamed in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; They've gone through and through me like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind."
— Emily Brontë

"Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production. "
— Raymond Chandler

"Common sense is the guy who tells you that you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always someone else's money he's adding up."
— Raymond Chandler (Playback)

"It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"...What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with Life."
— Dashiell Hammett

""I don t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.""
— Dashiell Hammett

"did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god i'm glad i'm dead because death is always better than dishonor? did they say i'm glad i died to make the world safe for democracy? did they say i like death better than losing liberty? did any of them ever say it's good to think i got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? did any of them ever say look at me i'm dead but i died for decency and that's better than being alive? did any of them ever say here i am i've been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it's wonderful to die for your native land? did any of them say hurray i died for womanhood and i'm happy see how i sing even though my mouth is choked with worms?"
— Dalton Trumbo (Johnny Got His Gun)

"It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love."
— Raymond Carver

"That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window."
— Raymond Carver

"It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power."
— Raymond Carver

"Weeks later, she said: 'The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don't laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?'

She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying"
— Raymond Carver

"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."
— Voltaire

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
— Voltaire

"Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day."
— Voltaire

" It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
— Voltaire

"Dare to think for yourself."
— Voltaire

"Anything too stupid to be said is sung. "
— Voltaire

"Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do."
— Voltaire

"'I should like to know which is worse: to be raped a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgars, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?'
'That is a hard question,' said Candide."
— Voltaire (Candide, or Optimism)

"Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills."
— Voltaire

"Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all."
— Voltaire

"Man is free at the instant he wants to be."
— Voltaire

"Liberty of thought is the life of the soul.""
— Voltaire

"It never got weird enough for me."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"What luck for rulers that men do not think."
— Adolf Hitler