Jim > Jim's Quotes

“Young Castle called me "Scoop." "Good Morning, Scoop. What's new in the word game?"

"I might ask the same of you," I replied.

"I'm thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?"

"Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out."

"Or the college professors."

"Or the college professors," I agreed. I shook my head. "No, I don't think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed."

"I just can't help thinking what a real shake up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems..."

"And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?" I demanded.

"They'd die more like mad dogs, I think--snarling & snapping at each other & biting their own tails."

I turned to Castle the elder. "Sir, how does a man die when he's deprived of the consolation of literature?"

"In one of two ways," he said, "petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system."

"Neither one very pleasant, I expect," I suggested.

"No," said Castle the elder. "For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“The covers of this book are too far apart.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“I leaned back in my chair, my fingers laced behind my head, and wondered at the complexities and contradictions that must have existed in the earth's original clay when God first scooped it up in His palms.”
― James Lee Burke, Jolie Blon's Bounce

“chaos: it has no plural.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“There is no rest stop on the misinformation highway.”
― Dahlia Lithwick

“He believed books had an aura that protected him, that without one beside him he would die. He happily slept without women. He never slept without a book.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“(On literary festivals) When you go and see a band play live, you are watching it do on stage what it is meant to do. When you watch an author perform live, you are, most of the time, watching a dog walk on its hind legs. ”
― Nicholas Lezard

“Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?”
― Mark Vonnegut

“Man who is without the arts is little above the beasts of the field.”
― Haldane McFall

“Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.”
― Brendan Behan

“Travel without surprise was merely an agenda.”
― Jim Malusa, Into Thick Air: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents

“You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy — being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler’s worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.

Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome.”
― Paul Theroux

“Wherever you go in the world, most people are pretty nice. They are eager to show you the best parts of the places they live. What gives interlopers the right to riffle through their dirty laundry?”
― Chuck Thompson

“Younger writers are always looking for "blurbs," one of the few words that sounds exactly as awful as the crime it's describing.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 3

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”
― Terry Pratchett

“I was able to see the love of God paving the world around me but I distrusted this knowledge because it was concrete.”
― Joni Tevis

“America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.”
― George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation