Ben > Ben's Quotes

“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.”
― Alain Robbe Grillet

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“One of the most incredible secrets of science fiction (although one not too closely guarded) is the fact that 99 percent of its authors do not know even the titles and authors of today's learned works, but still they want to top these scholars with their knowledge of the year 6000.”
― Stanisław Lem, Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy

“The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.”
― Stanisław Lem, Hospital of the Transfiguration

“What's so wonderful about experiments is that often they don't work. They do blow up in the oven; the Bride of Frankenstein does crawl out and strangle you with a black leotard while you shout your last prayers. It's only once you've tasted your own shocking failures, harebrained ideas, and sudden departures that you will realize something quite wonderful.”
― Susie Bright, How to Write a Dirty Story: Reading, Writing, and Publishing Erotica

“As more and more norms disappear from social praxis, literature faces ever-growing difficulties. Its predicament is beginning to resemble that of a child who has discovered that his incredibly understanding parents will let him break with impunity all his toys, indeed everything in the house. The artist cannot create specific prohibitions for himself in order to attack them later in his work; the prohibitions must be real, and hence independent of the writer's choices. And since the relativization of cultural norms has not so far been able to disturb the given characteristics of human biology, that is where writers today seek the still perceptible points of resistance--which is why literature is preoccupied with the theme of sex.”
― Stanisław Lem, Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy

“Do birds arise from ashes?
Will 5 years bring the dawn?
Or will night neverending
Subdue the rooster's song?”
― Ben Winch

“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.”
― Will Self

“A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.”
― Stanisław Lem

“The horse respects and obeys man because its large eyes magnify everything, so man appears much larger than the horse itself.”
― Stanisław Lem, Highcastle: A Remembrance

“Heroin is a stand-in, a stop-gap, a mask, for what we believe is missing. Like the "objects" seen by Plato's man in a cave, dope is the shadow cast by cultural movements we can't see directly.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“Addiction is a bargain with the cosmos: only stay time, and I'll remain in this holding pattern, too. The uncrossable gap between now and the past is given tangible form and conquered, daily, in the real but bridgeable gap between what I need and what I can get. Addiction creates a god so that time will stop--why all gods are created. God might be another story.”
― Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind.”
― John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

“Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer.”
― John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank

“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Strange how potent cheap music is.”
― Noel Coward, Private Lives: An Intimate Comedy in Three Acts