Bill Hsu > Bill's Quotes

“Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Collected Later Poems of Alvaro de Campos: 1928-1935

“Life’s not worth living if you’re not tending to the whims and demands of a high-maintenance lover!”
― Yukiko Motoya, The Lonesome Bodybuilder

“Q: Why write about slavery? Haven’t we had enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one?

A: I could have written about upper middle class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there’s a lot of competition.”
― Colson Whitehead

“There are some people who belong to the land of the dead and some who belong to the land of the living. And there are some who stand between the two, keeping open the door. These are the artists, dreamers, philosophers and mystics. They are strange people who tell of strange things. We must be patient with them. I myself, in my humble way, stand between these two worlds. I make the pastries. I wait. We all have our roles, as I believe you do.”
― Reggie Oliver, Flowers of the Sea

“Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.”
― Aneurin Bevan

“But this is not that kind of story, the kind meant to explain things. It simply tells things as they are, and as you know there is no explanation for how things are, at least none that would make any difference and allow them to be something else.”
― Brian Evenson, Song for the Unraveling of the World: Stories

“... there are two kinds of labyrinths: those you are born into and must escape, and those you choose to enter in search of what lies inside.”
― Lindsey Drager, The Archive of Alternate Endings

“My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive system, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“Magic is absurd. It is a system of thinking that does not work and does not get one anywhere," said the friar.

"It works, but it does not get one anywhere," said Vance.

"But it is very beautiful. Magic is an art that pleases the eye and the ear," said Bulbul.”
― Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nightmare

“Even when it was happening to me, I thought, 'This will make a good story someday,' but now that I think of it, its story's not that good at all. More important than its plot, it's the quality of feeling that strikes me now-something out of this world, 'outlandish' in its literal sense.”
― Kevin Killian, Fascination: Memoirs

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“Since I've started living out my dreams, since I've become the contemporary of the centuries to come, I no longer know death under the annihilating guise it has maintained in today's society. Only in my moments of deepest depression do I realise that in that world of swine into which I was born I shall be forced to die, just as out in the street I'm obliged to rub shoulders with priests and cops.”
― Ghérasim Luca, The Passive Vampire

“He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.”
― Willa Cather, Paul's Case

“I kept thinking, I'm wearing way too many clothes! And I fled. Finally night fell and I looked up at the moon that shone over Morningside Heights, its white soft beam so limpid, full of the poetry of Shakespeare and the Caribbean and George Eliot --- the antithesis I suppose of the hot lights I had grown to need. How relaxed, how relieved I now felt, in the white moonlight. Relieved of the chore of playing with the big boys. My clothes seemed to fit again, I became myself. The moon's fleecy lambency corralled my pieces and re-linked us, we joined "hands" as it were, and sang and danced in a circle, very Joseph Campbell, "me" regnant, manhood ceremonial. Birth of the hero. I became Kevin Killian. Did I make a mistake?”
― Kevin Killian, Fascination: Memoirs

“[Dagmar] Krause's material, on the other hand, is the kind of lunar voyage that reminds one how fortunate we are that a few record execs smoked dope in the late 1960s; how else could this music have slipped through the cracks?”
― Benjamin Piekut, Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem

“I am a horror maniac who prefers to stay at home.”
― Junji Ito

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

“He eventually became an executive for a firm. This meant that he actually executed persons with showers of legal documents proving that they owed him quantities of money which they did not have. 'Firm' actually means the manufacture of useless objects which people are foolish enough to buy. The firmer the firm the more senseless talk is needed to prevent anyone noticing the unsafe structure of the business. Sometimes these firms actually sell nothing at all for a lot of money, like 'Life Insurance', a pretense that it is a soothing and useful event to have a violent and painful death.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“If you live long enough, you learn that nothing has ever been, nor will it ever be, the way it used to be.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds: A Novel

“There is a confusion between myself and the literary world about what should constitute a text. I believe (along with many other writers historically) that a text should be elusive, and that the act of reading a text should make the reader conscious of the life they are living. That is, the text should overflow its borders, demonstrating the complicity of our consciousness with the coloring of our surroundings and the supposed sequentiality of events. To write texts this way, one must stop prior to the point of total explanation.”
― Jesse Ball, Autoportrait

“America ... loves the successful sociopath and thinks it’s normal to dream of becoming like him.”
― Gary Indiana

“Everything is relevant. I call it loving.”
― James Tate