Michael > Michael's Quotes

“There are only two things in life that make it worth living: the love of art and the art of love.” I had divided my human duration between the two. I had been wise enough to be a fool; I could die content.”
― Edmond Haraucourt, Illusions of Immortality

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.”
― John Hodgman, More Information Than You Require

“Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor's children?”
― Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“Horror is the removal of masks.”
― Robert Bloch

“Goodreads.com is actually about fiction not dreading goo. But I have a profile there, anyway...”
― Michael A. Arnzen

“Can you imagine life without the horror genre? There would be no monsters. Only a**holes.”
― Michael A. Arnzen

“For authors, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line only if you are writing the letter I.”
― Michael A. Arnzen

“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to whither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops---which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.”
― William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist

“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it’s not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage! Man, that's the truth, ain't it?”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“For the last fifty years or so, The Novel’s demise has been broadcast on an almost weekly basis. Yet it strikes me that whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future in, say, the digital ether, The Novel will continue to survive for some long time to come because it is able to investigate and cherish two things that film, music, painting, dance, architecture, drama, podcasts, cellphone exchanges, and even poetry can’t in a lush, protracted mode. The first is the intricacy and beauty of language—especially the polyphonic qualities of it to which Bakhtin first drew our attention. And the second is human consciousness. What other art form allows one to feel we are entering and inhabiting another mind for hundreds of pages and several weeks on end?”
― Lance Olsen

“Nothing is sillier than the creative writing teacher's dictum
"Write about what you know." But whether you're writing
about people or dragons, your personal observation of how
things happen in the world—how character reveals itself—can
turn a dead scene into a vital one. Preliminary good advice
might be: Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactly
what is there. All human beings see with astonishing accuracy,
not that they can necessarily write it down.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“When the dead person cries, it is a sign that he is on the road to get well,’ said the Crow solemnly.”
― Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio