Paul Grimsley > Paul's Quotes

“Where's the sense in stealing, without the grace to be it?”
― Ian Mcculloch

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.”
― William S. Burroughs

“The street finds its own uses for things.”
― William Gibson

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.”
― Warren Ellis

“Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.”
― Warren Ellis

“Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.”
― Hakim Bey, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone

“If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.”
― Emma Goldman

“Only nothing is impossible.”
― Grant Morrison

“We're the new power, come to replace the old. Cameras in the head, children with microchips, spin doctors rewriting reality as it happens. ”
― Grant Morrison

“Abandon the 'I', because it's a lie.”
― Grant Morrison

“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
― Henry Miller

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“The word is a prism through which the two beams shot from heart and head are refracted into the colours of the Universe.”
― Paul Grimsley

“shave you mind with occam's razor everyday”
― Paul Grimsley

“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.”
― J.G. Ballard

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Your head's like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are.”
― Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, Volume 1: Say You Want a Revolution

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
― Mark Twain

“The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois

“I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you...And you...And you...Gotta give em hope.”
― Harvey Milk, The Harvey Milk Interviews: In His Own Words

“He: What’s the matter with you?

Me: Nothing.

Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

“When you're moving in the positive, your destination is the brightest star.”
― Stevie Wonder

“Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.”
― Václav Havel

“Your hair is winter fire
January embers
My heart burns there, too.”
― Stephen King, It