Eric Kraft

“I wonder if any of you have ever noticed that it is sometimes those who find most pleasure and amusement in their fellow man, and have most hope in his goodness, who get the reputation of being his most carping critics. Maybe it is that the satirist is so full of the possibilities of humankind in general, that he tends to draw a dark and garish picture when he tries to depict people as they are at any particular moment. The satirist is usually a pretty unpopular fellow. The only time he attains even fleeting popularity is when his works can be used by some political faction as a stick to beat out the brains of their opponents. Satirical writing is by definition unpopular writing. Its aim is to prod people into thinking. Thinking hurts.

(John Dos Passos, 1957, from the speech he delivered upon accepting the Gold Medal for Eminence in Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters)”
― John Dos Passos

“Porky poked me on the shoulder and asked, “It’s a lot like life, isn’t it? A bus ride, that is.”
“Mmmmm?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Just think about it. You’re always on your way from one goddamned place to another, and you have to pay for the trip, and nobody cares whether you get there or not, and you feel miserable the whole time, and when you get there nobody’s there to meet you, and like as not you step off the bus into some dog shit.”
― Eric Kraft, Life on the Bolotomy

“Her work failed her. She had reached a desperate, claustrophobic stage of being imprisoned halfway in a novel: there was too much behind her for her to retreat and not a glimmer of light ahead. She sat for hours without writing, staring at the last few wrods on the page, seeing no significance in them. Her characters fell into frozen poses, speech died on their lips: they had sat at a banquet for weeks and she had not the power to bring them to their feet again.”
― Elizabeth Taylor

“He’d worked for his bread, been hounded, hounded and oppressed by people and by necessity, just like everyone else. He’d worked nights; in Amsterdam he came home from the office at one or two in the morning, then sat up, brooded, scribbled, written whole novels and burned them.
What could he do? What did they accomplish with all that? . . . The world was still turning, turning exactly the way it always had, and it would keep on turning without him. He let it get to him. Now he was more sensible. He washed his hands of it. There were enough salesmen and writers and talkers and people who let it get to them — more than enough.
And they were always afraid of something and sad about something. Always scared to be late somewhere or get a scolding from someone, or they couldn’t make ends meet, or the toilet was stopped up, or they had an ulcer or their Sunday suit was starting to wear thin, or the rent was due; they couldn’t do this because of that and couldn’t possibly do that because of this. When he was young he was never that stupid.”
― Nescio