Stuart Hill > Stuart's Quotes

“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

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
― Richard Dawkins

“It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace.”
― Ruth Rendell, Live Flesh

“She didn't really know London, only lived in it.”
― Ruth Rendell, The Water's Lovely

“People are different in reality from the way you've seen them while making scenarios in your mind. For one thing, they're less consistent. They surprise you all the time.”
― Ruth Rendell, The Water's Lovely

“Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you - and kill you the long, slow, hard way. And it can kill the people you love right along with you.”
― Billie Holiday

“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, - a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, - and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of the slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“The economic metaphor came to be applied to every aspect of modern life, especially the areas where it simply didn't belong. In fields such as education, equality of opportunity, health, employee's rights, the social contract and culture, the first conversation to happen should be about values and principles; then you have the conversation about costs, and what you as a society can afford.”
― John Lanchester, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

“I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“My good friend the Governor said I could settle down at Port Stanley and take things quietly for a few weeks. The street of that port is about a mile and a half long. It has the slaughterhouse at one end and the graveyard at the other. The chief distraction is to walk from the slaughterhouse to the graveyard. For a change one may walk from the graveyard to the slaughterhouse.”
― Ernest Shackleton

“They sounded really professional because they had two Vox AC 30 amplifiers. I also had an AC 30, so when you looked at it, three AC 30s, three Fenders - bloody hell, it must be a great band!”
― Tony Iommi

“in this Traffick they would frequently keep our goods and make no return, tell at last I was obliged to fire a Musquet ball Close past one man who had served us in this manner after which they observed a little more honisty and at length several of them came on board.”
― James Cook, Hunt For The Southern Continent

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
― Isaac Newton

“Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers

“Should my decease happen in Newcastle I desire that my remains may be laid near the south porch in Saint Andrews churchyard near the remains of my dear wife, and that the least possible expence may be laid out on my interment. Charles Avison”
― Charles Avison

“Immediately after his re-election [Cameron] announced: “For too long we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens so long as you obey the law we will leave you alone.” A statement so far to the right that it conceded the political centre ground to Judge Dredd.”
― Frankie Boyle

“Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.”
― J.G. Ballard

“At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.”
― Paul Theroux

“I was playing Rasputin and what was motivating him was crumpet really, and I was extremely keen on crumpet so I was really rather good as Rasputin. And my next catastrophic failure was Macbeth, who I played in the style of a crumpet-lover, and then when Doctor Who came along, I embraced this lunacy, this cloud-cuckoo-land where people had to be convinced by absolute nonsense. I came from a very religious background, so it was easy for me to believe in something I knew nothing about.”
― Tom Baker

“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

“After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

“we are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of true romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. i do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. this is what makes your self-respect so important, and i don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness”
― William S. Burroughs

“The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers”
― William S. Burroughs

“Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands

“Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”
― Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology

“The look that one directs at things, both outward and inward, as an artist, is not the same as that with which one would regard the same as a man, but at once colder and more passionate. As a man, you might be well-disposed, patient, loving, positive, and have a wholly uncritical inclination to look upon everything as all right, but as an artist your daemon constrains you to "observe", to take note, lightning fast and with hurtful malice, of every detail that in the literary sense would be characteristic, distinctive, significant, opening insights, typifying the race, the social or the psychological mode, recording all as mercilessly as though you had no human relationship to the observed object whatever.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

“Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common. The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course, the book is written by the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

“What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

“Amanda Werner and several other beautiful, elegant, conically breasted foreign ladies, from unspecified vaguely defined countries, plus a few bucolic co-called humorists, comprised Buster's perpetual core of repeats. Women like Amanda Werner never made movies, never appeared in plays; they lived out their queer, beautiful lives as guests on Buster's unending show, appearing, Isidore had once calculated, as much as seventy hours a week.”
― Philip K. Dick