John > John's Quotes

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Down in the city are the nice houses and the so-so houses and the lovers making out in dark yards and the babies crying for their moms, and I wonder if, other than Jesus, has this ever happened before. Maybe it happens all the time. Maybe there's angry dead all over, hiding in rooms, covered with blankets, bossing around their scared, embarrassed relatives. Because how would we know?”
― George Saunders, Pastoralia

“If living is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.”
― Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

“Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing.”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“That's it for me. I'm fucked. As per usual. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Although come to think of it I was never even the freaking bridesmaid. Look, show your cock. It's the shortest line between two points. The world ain't giving away nice lives. You got a trust fund? You a genius? Show your cock. It's what you got.”
― George Saunders

“I remember you organized the big laundry party and all of our friends took their dirty clothes to the laundromat and drank wine out of a wineskin until the manager threw us out because you kept yelling that there ought to be a prize given to the owner of the biggest pair of boxer shorts.”
― Emblem Editions, My Present Age

“…just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“Better to have been a dickhead and seen it,
than be a cunt all your life and not know it.”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“Write what you do not know, which I think is particularly helpful because—not to sound too much like Socrates—I’m not really convinced that anyone knows anything."
@Stintzi”
― John Elizabeth Stintzi

“What labels me, negates me.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Writing. It’s easy work. The equipment isn’t expensive, and you can pursue this occupation anywhere. You make your own hours, mess around the house in your pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape. You don’t have to be high-functioning or even, for the most part, functioning at all. If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I’d certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time, and production wouldn’t suffer. Bouts of poverty come along, anxiety, shocking debt, but nothing lasts forever. I’ve gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie—although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden