My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.
Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it.
Real life is messy, inconsistent, and it’s seldom when anything ever really gets resolved. It’s taken me a long time to realize that.
A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?
Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.
The past can’t hurt you anymore. Not unless you let it. They made you into a victim, Evey. They made you into a statistic. But, that’s not the real you. That’s not who you are inside.
We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – Who watches the watchmen?
It’s early days. A few skeletons are bound to keep jumping out of the closet.
It was as if life was one great big impersonal piece of machinery.
It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace.
My mother said I broke her heart…but it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it’s all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us…but within that inch we are free.
Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining.
Our masters have not heard the people’s voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.
His sister, in a big turquoise Angora sweater, leaned upon the wood frame of the open nursery door, anxiously looking out to see if he was really going to show, beaming and waving like a pastel colored TV Muppet when she spotted him.
Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history’s fingers, down it goes.
Evening work is economical. Power comes most cheaply by night.
Look at him now, poor fellow. That’s what a dose of reality does for you…Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations.
I still can’t believe it . . . him comin’ here everyday, nobody realizin’. Still, that’s life: lotta stuff happens under the waterline.
Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.
It wasn’t so much all the sex that robbed me of my moral bearings, but all the narcotics. I must say, there’s something about opium that goes very well with lesbianism.
I’m 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.
Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing.
I leave the human cockroaches to discuss their heroin and child pornography.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! YOU’VE READ ABOUT IT IN THE NEWSPAPERS! NOW, SHUDDER AS YOU OBSERVE, BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES, THAT MOST RAREAND RAGIC OF NATURE’S MIS
People’s lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and… well, sometimes they can’t talk about them.
Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world.
And it’s only symbolism puts magic and meaning into anything. You of all people should know that. We can make love amongst the gods, or we can screw on a dirty mattress. It’s our choice.
If we loved Steve Aylett, really loved him in the way that he deserves, a selfless love that genuinely wanted nothing save his happiness and comfort, we’d lobotomise him.
Dan, I’m not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I’d explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.
Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all
Language comes first. It’s not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven’t got language, you can’t be conscious.
The things that are most popular are usually rubbish, stand up for what’s important, not popular.
How can two people hate so much without knowing each other?
You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.
People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.
They are bright and exciting. Like America. Like its women.
All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.
Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.
Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea… and ideas are bulletproof.
There’s no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There’s only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.
Are you like, a crazy person?I’m quite sure they will say so.
Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate.
We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.
Come, dry your eyes, for you are LIFE, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes, and let’s go home.
So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there’s always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.
…My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was. I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can’t you?
Do not weep. Being is enough. There, that is all. I am done…
If gods are transcendent ideas, then the idea of a god IS a god.
There, did you think to kill me? There’s no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There’s only an idea.Ideas are bulletproof. Farewell.
I’m the idea of the human imagination, which, when you think about it, is the only thing we can really be certain ISN’T imaginary.
Some things are hard to imagine. Can you conceive of excessive contentment, for example? Or an over pleasant evening? Too much happiness?
… and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout: ‘Save us!’. And I’ll look down and whisper: ‘No.
Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade.
Authority allows two roles: the torturer and the tortured. Twists people into joyless mannequins that fear and hate, while culture plunges into the abyss.
When reading you have the opportunity to pause for thought & spark your imagination. It develops intellect. Nothing more threatening to a politician than a well read working class.
I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing.
I’m not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it’s true, but I do have a sense of humor.
I really can’t be bothered going to a barber. And shaving every morning, that’s nightmarish. I spent my teenage years covered in tiny little bits of toilet paper.
I love the smell of paper in the morning it smells like victory.
Don’t leave home without your sword – your intellect.
Magic is a state of mind. It is often portrayed as very black and gothic, and that is because certain practitioners played that up for a sense of power and prestige. That is a disservice. Magic is very colorful. Of this, I am sure.
Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.
It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise.
For me, there is very little difference between magic and art. To me, the ultimate act of magic is to create something from nothing: It’s like when the stage magician pulls the rabbit from the hat.
I’m remote from most technology to the point that I’m kind of Amish.
In the sixties, for anybody to suggest that the government didn’t have our best interests at heart and policemen sometimes killed people would have automatically made them a radical firebrand lefty. That’s not the case anymore.
Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you’ll find it’s very different!