If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something
you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl
with rage or cry, that's honey.
A.N. Wilson
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Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is
saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his
great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst
intentions. And society, without realizing it... respects and even
exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion,
since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths
of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and
there is no other.
Ernesto Sábato
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Those Romans who perpetrated the rape of the Sabines, for example, did
not work themselves up for the deed by screening Debbie Does
Dallas, and the monkish types who burned a million or so witches
in the Middle Ages had almost certainly not come across Boobs and
Buns or related periodicals.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.
George Bernard Shaw
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Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The
only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
Henry Miller
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The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof,
shit detector.
Ernest Hemingway
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Be not too liberal; it doth belong
To dogs alone to fuck the whole day long.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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The French bourgeois doesn't dislike shit, provided it is served up to
him at the right time.
Jean-Paul Sartre
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Painting and fucking a lot are not compatible; it weakens the
brain.
Vincent Van Gogh
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If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's
ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to
an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister,
modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest
some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty
convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have
anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned
salmon.
Aleister Crowley
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All quotes are taken from Microsoft Bookshelf 98
© 1987-1996 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press.
© 1993, 1995 Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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