Iain Sinclair > Quotes

“Why not add another yarn? That’s all we are in the end, any of us, a couple of dozen unreliable stories.”
― Iain Sinclair, Landor's Tower: or, Imaginary Conversations

“The suicide hour of cold coffee and alien voices on the radio.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“The faster we walk, the more ground we lose.”
― Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London

“Light is all memory.”
― Iain Sinclair

“The line of traffic advancing towards the rising sun looked like a procession of the returning dead. Every one of them, solitaries in clean shirts, smoking, checking mirrors to see if their reflections were still there, wore dark glasses.”
― Iain Sinclair, London Orbital

“All kinds of weird stuff going down, whisperings in corners, significant matches struck and blown out. The whores, unoccupied, were drinking heavily. The police, occupied were drinking even more heavily. The grass in the corner wanted to drink most heavily, but lacked the poke.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“You can be so much in a room that the world outside turns to water. You've got the heater blowing out burnt air, but you still don't get warm. Your ankles are singed, but your head's in a bucket of ice. Time drips like a stalactite. The water for the coffee boils away in a tree of steam.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“Getting comprehensively lost in a car with a full tank of petrol at someone else's expense, you can't beat it.”
― Iain Sinclair

“Men of the cloth live in this monologue, it is their due: nobody talks back to a pulpit.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“Atkins knows two kinds of birds: seagulls and the ones that aren't seagulls.”
― Iain Sinclair, London Orbital

“...drunk enough on earth's liquors to relish the prospect of the knife.”
― Iain Sinclair, Slow Chocolate Autopsy

“Mossy had trouble breathing. He was not convinced the rewards repaid the effort. He took breath in, but after that let it fend for itself.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret's Thatcher's Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of 'Fitzcarraldo', a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts:Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth,post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral.”
― Iain Sinclair, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

“I looked at this first sheet, words scribbled confidently on a lined pad. My attempt at making contact the spirit of Llandor. Disaster. I couldn’t do the language or locate the period. The pad of paper, with its grey-mauve rules, was all wrong. It was intended for meaningful work, figures, calculations, notes.”
― Iain Sinclair, Landor's Tower: or, Imaginary Conversations

“For a poet the world is always static in the sense that you’re a mass observer and you can’t afford to care whether people are busy or not. You’re a witness.”
― Iain Sinclair, American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light

“That made sense of gabby meetings: salient points isolated from the gush of acoustic froth. This paper belonged on a clipboard, not being defaced by dud literature.
--Iain Sinclair”
― Iain Sinclair, Landor's Tower: or, Imaginary Conversations

“One thing I had learnt, the last person you should ask for a solution is the author. If he knew where he was going, he’d stop dead in his tracks.”
― Iain Sinclair, Landor's Tower: or, Imaginary Conversations

“I was gazing back in the direction of Wales, watching the Prudence clone, when I noticed a couple of drunks lurching in my direction. Night people who live in service stations. The insufficiently deceased.”
― Iain Sinclair, Landor's Tower: or, Imaginary Conversations

“The poet he was escorting into Wales was a Horus-headed dud of some personal magnetism. The hair was feathered gell, the nose hooked. He stared at me and he didn’t. His eyes belonged to a magician; one bored into you, right through the lens into the depths of the vitreous humor—while the other popped and wobbled in the style of Ben Turpin. He folded in on himself, profile sharp as an axe. A labrys. This man would have no problem seeing around a corner.”
― Iain Sinclair, Landor's Tower: or, Imaginary Conversations

“Siebel, The Magazine has a man in a suit on the cover. He's not smiling, or frowning. He wears a beard that isn't a beard; it's a quotation from a film nobody can put their finger on. 'Customer satisfaction,' says the brochure. 'Seamless integration.' 'Comprehensive upgrade.' Of what? I want to scream. 'Solutions provider.' Siebel has solutions for questions that have not yet been asked, will never be asked.
A Sino-American businessman holds a tiny screen in his hand: 'You're always connected and always available. Some call it a revolution; others call it evolution.' Language is de-fanged, homogenised. Yellow E-tab faces leer at you. Ecstasy without frenzy. Satisfaction, whether you want it or not.”
― Iain Sinclair

“He stood, fluffing his feathers: as poet, priest of place, shoulders sloped like folded wings; magenta scarf, scarlet lining to anorak, black-rimmed spectacles and aureole of wizardly white hair.”
― Iain Sinclair, The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City

“I mean that certain fictions, chiefly Conan Doyle, Stevenson, but many others also, laid out a template that was more powerful than any local documentary account - the presences that they created, or "figures" if you prefer it, like Rabbi Loew's Golem, became too much and too fast to be contained within the conventional limits of that fiction. They got out into the stream of time, the ether; they escaped into the labyrinth. They achieved an independent existence.
The writers were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present. They got in on the curve of time, so that by writing, by holding off the inhibiting reflex of the rational mind, they were able to propose a text that was prophetic.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“Geography is destiny. – James Ellroy”
― Iain Sinclair, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report

“With their pinched skull-faces and their tufting professorial hair, they resembled a tribe of pygmy Lord Longfords - flinching, purse-lipped from the pain of the world. Delicate human hands fluttered vaporously, or masturbated in absorbed lethargy.”
― Iain Sinclair

“With plenty of practice, we have learnt how to make a ritual of grief, even for those we have never met and know little about.”
― Iain Sinclair, The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City

“MIDSUMMER: the shortest night. The year on its side. Joblard is to marry. To make that act, that avowal: St Bartholomew-the-Great. The Chemical Wedding, sponsus and sponsa, merging in song, twisting around the columns of that stone forest; celebrated here in the blending of russian stout, nigredo, with dry blackthorn cider. The risks crowd us, cackle; magpies at the window.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings