James Purdy > Quotes

“In a competitive society, the thing people fear the most is love.”
― James Purdy

“He stood there, his eyes like they had been before. Their beauty stabbed at her heart like a great knife; the hair looked so like she had just pressed the wet comb to it and perhaps put a little pomade on the sides; and the small face was clean and sad. Yet her arms somehow did not ache to hold him like her heart told her they should. Something too far away and too strong was between her and him; she only saw him as she had always seen resurrection pictures, hidden from us as in a wonderful mist that will not let us see our love complete.”
― James Purdy, 63, Dream Palace: Selected Stories, 1956-1987

“The worse the author, the more he is known.”
― James Purdy

“Some people confess in the flesh, others on paper.”
― James Purdy, Eustace Chisholm and the Works

“Writing is like a battle. You’re often so into it you don’t have any high ideals. You’re just doing it. I have all these boxing prints on my walls. I always feel that’s what I am, a boxer. I get my brains knocked out every so often.”
― James Purdy

“Pleasure died forty years ago in America, perhaps further back, in a wave of carbon monoxide, gasoline, cigarettes for dames, the belief in everything and everybody, tolerance for the intolerable, the hatred of being alone in silence for more than twenty seconds, the assurance that immortality was Americans eating all-cow franks, with speeded-up peristalsis while talking to a crowd of fifteen trillion other same-bodies eating sandwiches, gassing cokes, peristalsing, and talking, while baseball-sound-movie-TV tomorrow's trots off track betting howled roared farted choked gagged exploded reentered atmo honked bawled deafened pawed puked croaked shouted repeated repeated REPEATED, especially SAY IT AGAIN LOUDER SAY IT AGAIN, stick that product in every God-damned American's mouth and make him say I BOUGHT IT, GOD I BOUGHT IT AND IT'S GREAT IT's HOLLYWOOD IT'S MY ARSE GOING UP AND DOWN AGAIN, IT'S USA, GOD, and if you can't get it in his mouth and make him SWEAR IT SWEAR IT USA, stick it in his anal sphincter (look it up in the dictionary, college graduates, on account of you didn't have time to learn it in the College of Your Choice).”
― James Purdy

“Most books don’t even come into the world with the noise of the still-born.”
― James Purdy, Cabot Wright Begins

“The New York Times Review of Books is toilet paper. Used.”
― James Purdy

“Never deprecate another person's sufferings even when imaginary.”
― James Purdy

“Great books, if long enough and full of topical description and contemporary comment, were now coming into even wider public favor. The lengthier and fuller of comment, the better.”
― James Purdy, Cabot Wright Begins

“For imagine having somebody beside you day and night loving you and forgiving you and petting you forever and ever, that must be a better description of hell than being put into a boiling lake or cauldron of ice that burnt your black.”
― James Purdy, Narrow Rooms

“Amos, talk about pearls for teeth ... you got ‘em. No wonder the boys go for you, because I could too and if I had something to push between those pearly teeth I’d be first in line.”
― James Purdy, Eustace Chisholm and the Works

“Mexican marijuana, which he called the schoolboy’s consolation.”
― James Purdy, Eustace Chisholm and the Works

“It was paper, as he had once joked to Amos, that he was really queer for.”
― James Purdy, Eustace Chisholm and the Works

“New York has collapsed.”
― James Purdy

“If the book’s bad enough, they’ll publish it, and if it’s bad bad enough, the daily reviewers will love it, and it’ll sell.”
― James Purdy, Cabot Wright Begins

“Why, if Daniel Haws was to take out his naked cock and shake it in your face, you’d die of apoplexy.”
― James Purdy, Eustace Chisholm and the Works

“And yet Curt’s a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that’s all.”
― James Purdy, Cabot Wright Begins

“He’s America in action — opposed to quality.”
― James Purdy, Cabot Wright Begins

“She made no point of concealing the truth, for the truth was all she could bear now.”
― James Purdy, Eustace Chisholm and the Works

“I don’t think of people as queer or straight,” the Doc said. “Not when you’re as old as I. And I don’t think God does either.”
“I didn’t know you believed in God, Doc,” Vance said.”
― James Purdy, Narrow Rooms

“I don't think I'd like it if people liked me, I'd think that something had gone wrong.”
― James Purdy

“One fine day you’ve got to give your body to somebody, or turn into a fully-fledged zombie.”
― James Purdy, Eustace Chisholm and the Works

“I have wrote my name in hell,” Brian McFee had said as he was dying on the sawdust of the floor in the Bent Ridge Tavern.”
― James Purdy, Narrow Rooms

“One morning while drinking coffee with Amos, Daniel Haws looked up suddenly, as if feeling the boy’s eyes on him, and said:
“Tryin’ to burn holes starin’ like that?”
“Guess I was just resting my eyes on you so as not to look at your wallpaper,” Amos gave a sour apology.
Daniel closed the book he was reading, a volume of Rhodes’s history of the United States, and took a careful look at the kitchen wallpaper.
“Yes,” he admitted, “that wallpaper is goddam ancient.”
― James Purdy, Eustace Chisholm and the Works

“Just like children, he and the greatwoman Grainger longed, and especially demanded even, that something should happen, or again Parkhearst would cry, “A reward, I must have a reward. A reward for life just as I have lived it.”
― James Purdy, The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

“Curt, my husband, is a writer, and he’ll never write again. That’s our funeral, as they say down south. Now in your case, my pet, you’re married to a phenomenon of our own special epoch, a man who couldn’t in a thousand years be a writer in the only meaning of the term, but who can and probably will write a book.”
― James Purdy, Cabot Wright Begins

“She was a church open only for him, with services in full operation twenty-four hours a day.”
― James Purdy, Cabot Wright Begins

“My idea of heaven is to be hunting with you in some beautiful park with mountains like here at home but where we won’t need guns or prey but we will just walk together arm in arm in this good world and be by ourselves always together forever and a day.”
― James Purdy, Narrow Rooms

“Why should you expect everything to work out successful? You’re old enough to know better.”
― James Purdy, Cabot Wright Begins