John > John's Quotes

“I don’t know what made me think of this…oh, oh, I actually do know. My mom and I got here a little early tonight, so I went over to the, uh…the Foot Locker, just to look around, kill time…and you know how they have all the different sections for the different kinds of sneakers, like a running section, a basketball section, etc.…So I saw this sign for cross-training sneakers, and that’s what made me think of this…I don’t know if you guys have ever run into people who do this cute sort of thing when you’re talking to them, where if you say, “XYZ,” they’ll say, “You’re XYZ”…I knew this girl who used to do it all the time…like I’d say something like “There’s a hegemonic imperative in cross-training,” and she’d say, “You’re a hegemonic imperative in cross-training.” Or we’d be out at a restaurant, and I’d say, “That pasta looks like a bowl of infant foreskins,” and she’d say, “You’re a bowl of infant foreskins.” So once, the Imaginary Intern said to me—and I don’t remember what the context was—but he said that “memory (and, in a sense, autobiography) is like a rash that blossoms and fades,” and I said to him, “You’re like a rash that blossoms and fades.” And then, after he was gone, I realized that he actually was like a rash that had blossomed and faded…an ache that time won’t assuage.”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind

“In 1955, the year my mom was pregnant with me, Bertolt Brecht voted Mao Zedong’s essay “On Contradiction” the “best book” he had read in the past twelve months, a period of time that saw the publication of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! Mao…a guy who never brushed his teeth, who just rinsed his mouth out with tea when he woke up…who, according to his personal physician, Li Zhisui, never cleaned his genitals. Instead, Mao said, “I wash myself inside the bodies of my women.” The Imaginary Intern and I were great admirers of Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art and we diligently tried to apply his dictum “Discard what is backward and develop what is revolutionary” to the production of Gone with the Mind, and although I agree with Mao that one should bathe infrequently, and that when one does, one should use the vaginal flora of other creatures instead of soap, I subscribe unswervingly to the conviction that a gentleman should never go out in public at night without pomaded hair and heavy cologne…”
― Mark Leyner, Gone with the Mind