David Noone > David's Quotes

“Inspiration is a word used by people who aren't really doing anything.”
― Nick Cave

“I am not, as you will have observed, a man greatly enamored of his fellow human beings. I do not enter lightly into the foibles and whimsicalities of others, I do not suffer fools gladly, I seem able, in conversation, only to needle or be needled. My relationships, as a result, are few, and those few are tenuous, prickly sorts of arrangements, altogether lacking in the spontaneity and intimacy for which humans, I'm told, have an instinctive need. I am aware of no such instincts myself. ”
― Patrick McGrath

“Light is all memory.”
― Iain Sinclair

“ What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one's life, so that each work is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death.
I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on paper.”
― Jeremy Reed

“Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer’s block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I’m projecting here.”
― Nick Cave

“(Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“The decadent artist markets other people's pain”
― Jennifer Birkett

“Although he had always been a gentleman till then, he had 'caught his century', a disease impossible to analyze but by this simple phrase.”
― Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”
― Jean Cocteau

“The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.”
― Jean Cocteau

“If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.”
― Jean Cocteau

“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“Please do not understand me too quickly.”
― André Gide

“To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.”
― Jean Genet

“My ambition was to live like music.”
― Mary Gaitskill

“Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.”
― Tom Waits

“You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.”
― Tom Waits

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
― E.E. Cummings

“Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it. ”
― Raymond Chandler

“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.”
― Raymond Chandler

“I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”
― Raymond Chandler

“A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.”
― Raymond Chandler

“I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.”
― Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe's Guide to Life

“You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“Nora: "How do you feel?"
Nick: "Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober.”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

“Dreams are manifestations of identities.”
― Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

“Be yourself, no one can ever tell you you’re doing it wrong.”
― James Leo Herlihy