Charles > Charles's Quotes

“Words are the bones. Writing is the lungs. Reading is like breathing.”
― T.L. Crain

“Art is anything you can get away with.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“As with most things, my approach to writing has been entirely ass-backwards. I first had to become everything but a writer -- exhaust all possibilities. I had to come to it on my knees. Only when there was truly nothing left, was I able to become a writer.”
― Quentin R. Bufogle

“Standing before him, the blight of idyllic thought and aspiration--rotting souls reproducing like fleas.”
― Glen Krisch

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“It is difficult for my fellow countrymen who have never lived abroad to understand that until a foreign man is about sixty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he'd like to punch an American in the face. Even people like the Chinese, who mostly like us, think of us--at least partly--as loud, fat, poorly dressed, overprivileged, hectoring, naive, arrogant, self-righteous bullies with little knowledge and no interest in any culture other than our own. I once had a conversation with a Japanese journalist who said to me, "You don't seem like an American." When I asked him, slightly hurt, why he said that, he replied, "Because you listen.”
― Matthew Polly, American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China

“The beat reminded me of some of the stuff that Tracy listened to, the stuff that sounded like robots having angry sex in the middle of a disco.”
― Charles Colyott, Jianghu

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison