Don > Don's Quotes

“The fact is that everything I have in my pockets is carefully chosen so I’ll always be prepared. Everything is there so I can be at an advantage at the moment of truth. Actually, that’s not accurate. Everything’s there so I won’t be at a disadvantage at the moment of truth.”
― Etgar Keret, פתאום דפיקה בדלת

“I want to be violated by insight.”
― Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“But I come to stories in the naked hope they will fuck me up.”
― Steve Almond, This Won't Take But a Minute, Honey

“Stories do not change the world. I’ve learned that. But perhaps in some secret, subtle way.... I mean it’s not the world I want to change.”
― Carol Emshwiller, Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories

“I've often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order of importance; I usually use it to approach the large issue of perception, so that my fantastical elements, while intended as real within the stories, occupy some borderland between reality and psychology.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, Black Glass

“I always had plenty of ideas. I didn’t exactly have them. They grew—little by little, a half an idea at a time. First, part of a phrase and then a person to go with it. After a person, then a little corner of a place for the person to be in.”
― Carol Emshwiller, Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories

“As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Men and Cartoons: Stories

“...but I felt then the same way Nicky did, that I was getting myself more life. Not necessarily a better life, not a life more promising than the one I already had. But because I thought this life was in addition to and not instead of, I devoured it without a second's hesitation.”
― Etgar Keret, The Nimrod Flipout

“The girl in your class who suggests that this year the Drama Club put on The Bald Soprano will be a thorn in people's sides all of her life.”
― Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life/Social Studies

“If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.”
― Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life/Social Studies

“I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don't know won't hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility.”
― Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life/Social Studies

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
― Fran Lebowitz, The Fran Lebowitz Reader

“Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, High Lonesome: Selected Stories, 1966-2006

“It's amazing how people can sound like retards when they're talking to their girlfriend, especially if they really love her a lot. Because when you're just fucking someone you make a point of keeping your cool, but when you're really in love - it can sound pretty repulsive.”
― Etgar Keret, The Nimrod Flipout

“I thought of myself, in those days, as someone in disguise—beneath the obedient son, beneath the straight-A student, the agreeable well-brought-up boy with his friends and his ping-pong and his semiofficial girlfriend, there was another being, restless, elusive, mocking, disruptive, imperious, and this shadowy underself had nothing to do with that other one who laughed with his friends and went to school dances and spent summer afternoons at the beach.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

“He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right — something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before.”
― Etgar Keret, פתאום דפיקה בדלת

“The truth was loose: I was the son of a son of a bitch, an ancestral prodigy born to clobber my way through loathsome dungheaps of idiot labor. My genes were cocked and loaded. I was a meteor, a gunslinger, a switchblade boomerang hurled from the pecker dribblets of my forefathers' untainted jalopy seed. I was Al Kaline peggin’ home a beebee from the right field corner. I was Picasso applyin’ the final masterstroke to his frenzied Guernica. I was Wilson Pickett stompin’ up the stairway of the Midnight Hour. I was one blazin’ tomahawk of m-fuggin’ eel snot. Graceful and indomitable. Methodical and brain-dead. The quintessential shoprat. The Rivethead.”
― Ben Hamper, Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line

“Flint, Michigan. Detroit as seen backwards through a telescope. The callus on the palm of the state shaped like a welder's mitt. A town where 66.5 percent of the working citizenship are in some way, shape or form linked to the shit-encrusted underbelly of a French buggy racer named Chevrolet and a floppy-eared Scotchman named Buick. A town where 23.5 percent of the population pimp everything from Elvis on velvet to horse tranquilizers to Halo Burgers to NRA bumper stickers. A town where the remaining 10 percent sit back and watch it all go by—sellin’ their blood, rollin’ convenience stores, puffin’ no-brand cigarettes while cursin’ their wives and kids and neighbors and the flies sneakin’ through the screens and the piss-warm quarts of Red White & Blue and the Skylark parked out back with the busted tranny.”
― Ben Hamper, Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line