fallen down the rabbit hole of Paris Review author interviews

Ray Bradbury

INTERVIEWER

Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not? 

BRADBURY

Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery. 

 BRADBURY

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself. 

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever used a computer? 

BRADBURY

Up until my stroke, I used a typewriter. An IBM Selectric. Never a computer. A computer’s a typewriter. Why would I need another typewriter? I have one. 

INTERVIEWER

Most would argue that a computer makes revising a whole lot easier. Not to mention spell-check. 

BRADBURY

I’ve been writing for seventy years, if I don’t know how to spell now . . .

INTERVIEWER

Do you write outlines?

BRADBURY

No, never. You can’t do that. It’s just like you can’t plot tomorrow or next year or ten years from now. When you plot books you take all the energy and vitality out. There’s no blood. You have to live it from day to day and let your characters do things.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?

BRADBURY

Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

Joan Didion

INTERVIEWER

By now you’ve written at least as much nonfiction as you have fiction. How would you describe the difference between writing the one or the other?

JOAN DIDION

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. You have no notes—or sometimes you do, I made extensive notes for A Book of Common Prayer—but the notes give you only the background, not the novel itself. In nonfiction the notes give you the piece. Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

INTERVIEWER

What misapprehensions, illusions and so forth have you had to struggle against in your life? In a commencement address you once said there were many.

DIDION

All kinds. I was one of those children who tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it. I began with a literary idea of experience, and I still don't know where all the lies are. For example, it may not be true that people who try to fly always burst into flames and fall. That may not be true at all. In fact people do fly, and land safely. But I don't really believe that. I still see Icarus. I don't seem to have a set of physical facts at my disposal, don't seem to understand how things really work. I just have an idea of how they work, which is always trouble.

Jonathan Lethem

INTERVIEWER

You can’t imagine experiencing a crisis of faith.

LETHEM

Crisis of faith? But that’s not where the writer lives. He lives in sentences, in fictional architecture. Look, anyone seeking ontological meltdown can easily find it in the attempt to write. Many have. The need to fall apart is well indulged in this line of work.

INTERVIEWER

What were you afraid to do?

LETHEM

I’d be afraid to not be funny, afraid to not be charming. You can only do so many things. This is something I’ve come to understand: there’s a strict ecology on a given page. Those things that people feel are missing from books are missing because they are crowded out by other things. Not because the person wouldn’t have liked to also do them. Once you’ve devoted a lot of energy and attention to accomplishing certain things, that’s where your energy has gone. It’s a zero-sum game.

Most recently I’ve let go of a certain kind of lean efficiency, a devotion to structure. To plot. The fact is, almost every writer I ultimately find most important to me is hugely digressive, and largely uninterested in any plot that can be admired for its exoskeletal integrity.

Tobias Wolff

INTERVIEWER

What’s your writing day like?

WOLFF

Boring, if you’re not me. I take a walk or go for a swim, then go to work, eat, take a walk, write, come home. I never go to movies about writers because writers lead very boring lives if they’re actually working. When I was a kid and saw these pictures of Hemingway on safari or fishing in Idaho, or Fitzgerald in Paris, I thought, What an exciting life writers must lead. What I didn’t know is that’s what they do when they’re not writing. What’s exciting is finding a word that’s been dodging you for days, or deciding to cut something you’ve spent weeks on. The excitement’s in the writing. It doesn’t offer much in the way of drama, I’m afraid. Routine becomes invaluable to writers, and that’s why once they hit their stride, their biographies make very poor material.
Think about the way other people work—lawyers, for example. They get up from their desk, they walk into the doorway of the office next door, and say, Hey, do you remember that Warthog v. Warthog case from two years ago? and they talk about it, and that’s work. They go out, meet clients and take depositions, they have meetings where they discuss strategies for pursuing a particular case—it’s a very social profession. I wonder how much of their time is actually spent dead alone, producing hard solitary thought for hours a day. That’s what writing is and in that way it’s very hard work and it absolutely requires all the conditions that make one a bore: You have to be alone a lot, you have to be rather sedentary, you have to be a creature of routine, you have to fetishize your solitude, and you have to become very, very selfish about your time.

 WOLFF

I respond to something gracious in the writer. That doesn’t mean nice, or kind, or consoling, though it can have that effect. It has to do with a certain courage and verve and even sense of play in facing things as they are. If there’s no grace to be found in things as they are, then you’ll have to find it in things as they aren’t, and you know what Yeats wrote about that: “We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”

INTERVIEWER

Is that writing’s purpose, then, to present a gracious reality?

WOLFF

I don’t know that writing needs to have a purpose in that sense. Think of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, or Kenny Barron and Charlie Haden’s Night and the City. To the extent that I can feel the presence of grace—the operation of some kind of grace in the world—I often feel it in music like this, where the words God or revolution or even soul are not to be heard. And what does music accomplish, after all? Can it be said to offer a plan for improving us, can it be said to give us new political visions, can it be said to make an argument for this or that faith? No. It is a good purely in itself, and that is a sufficient justification for its existence.

 John Irving:

INTERVIEWER

Some people say you write disaster fiction.

IRVING

Such things don’t happen? Is that what they mean? You bet I write disaster fiction. We have compiled a disastrous record on this planet, a record of stupidity and absurdity and self-abuse and self-aggrandizement and self-deception and pompousness and self-righteousness and cruelty and indifference beyond what any other species has demonstrated the capacity for, which is the capacity for all the above. I am sick of secure and smugly conventional people telling me that my work is bizarre simply because they’ve found a safe little place to live out the chaos of the world—and who then deny that this chaos happens to other, less fortunate people. If you’re rich, are you permitted to say there’s no poverty, no starvation? If you’re a calm, gentle soul, do you say there’s no violence except in bad movies and bad books? I don’t make much up. I mean that. I am not the inventor I’ve been given credit for being. I just witness a different news—it’s still news, it still is just what happens, but more isolated and well-described so you might notice it a little more clearly.

D.F.W.

May 21, 2005, commencement speech. David Foster Wallace.

So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- at least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".
And I submit that this is what the real value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again.
But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides.
But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.


come on, you know you want to read a 1,000 page book with me this summer. (Infinite Jest)

LQ music

And you know, there is one piece of music that I cannot listen to, it makes me cry so much my nose stops up, I cannot breathe, my eyes run like streams.

--wm. styron

It is majestic music; all the suffering of a millennium is in it, all the longing, and all the tenderness; it is unbearable. It ends. A telephone rings: a friend wishes to speak of this same mystic beauty that has swept down out of the skies to fill his distant home.

--wm. durant

LQ-Salinger

"Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion."

Regina's Song - book quote

"Hugging doesn't have anything to do with that," Twink replied. "Every house should have an official hugger- no questions, no comments, just hugs. A few good hugs can take away acres of lonesome. The people with the notepads don't understand that. They talk and talk and talk, and it doesn't do any good at all. What we really need is hugs." She sighed then. "A hug lets us know that it's not really important to you that we're crazy, and that you like us all the same. That's all we want."

Regina's Song, David and Leigh Eddings

Ways of Seeing, by John Berger

from "Ways Of Seeing" by John Berger




"A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others.

By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste...indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.

She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance of what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.

Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women must contain it and interiorize it. That part of a woman's self which is the surveyor treats the part which is the surveyed so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self would like to be treated. And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself constitutes her presence. Every woman's presence regulates what is and is not "permissible" within her presence. Every one of her actions-- whatever its direct purpose or motivation-- is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. If a woman throws a glass on the floor, this is an example of how she treats her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. If a man does the same, his action is only read as an expression of his anger. If a woman makes a good joke this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself and accordingly of how she as a joker-woman would like to be treated by others. Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake.

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object-- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight."

Colin Meloy, you lovely man.

Interview with A.V. Club, featuring Colin with mutton chops. Adorable.

You have a devoted fandom that loves you because you write these complicated, lyrically dense things that tap into old myths, but you also have detractors who inevitably think you’re being pretentious. Does that bother you?

"I don’t know. I mean, nobody likes being called names, but I guess it’s a good thing, in that at least we’re raising some people’s hackles. It’s not totally milquetoast stuff."

[re: Morrissey, same kind of issue] "They [his songs] could be serious in this kind of maudlin narcissism, or he was being funny, and poking fun at himself. And either way, you could relate to it: you could either bask in that glow of fatalistic narcissism, or you could think it was funny. I always thought that was an interesting dynamic in his songwriting, and I can only aspire to have that kind of dynamic in my songs."

[twitter] "I guess people, just from what they read, think that I exclusively read Thomas Hardy novels over and over again. I’m a normal person, and I’m not a Luddite. I think there’s a place for emoticons in the world. I’m not really a grammar stickler. I think it’s fun to make fun of grammar sticklers. I think you’ve got 140 characters in a Tweet, and it’s all about e-conomy."

Colbert & Narcissism.

I am liveblogging about updating my facebook status.

Now my trifecta is complete.

Emily Yoffe: "If our society was made up of entirely narcissistic personalities, we'd have no worshippers."

Oh Sylvia

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.
Sylvia Plath

in which i take a short break to share my bookreading quote journal highlights with you, my dear reader

Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About Mil Millington (British)

(looking for keys) I'm a single degree of enraged frustration away from continuing the search along the only remaining path, which is slashing open the cushion covers, pulling up the floorboards and pickaxing through the plasterboard false wall in the attic.

A tragedy is the tale of a person who holds the seeds of his own destruction within him. This is entirely contrary to my situation -- everyone else holds the seeds of my destruction within them; I just wanted to keep my head down and hope my lottery numbers came up, thanks very much.

Presumably because I spent a previous life beating tiny puppies with thorny sticks, I had been cast into the Library at the University of NorthEast England.

After a few minutes, I noted from my PC screen - "You have 217 new e-mails" - that the server must be up and running again.

I never see [his face] anymore as he has had his face craned over his GameBoy at a permanent 45 degree angle since a little past his 5th birthday.
Jon is emotional and introspective, Peter carefully focused on learning how to kill a man with his thumbs.

Ursula: In what way, may I ask, can two bedrooms feel like three?
Pel: On an emotional level.
It's a nice place and it's eighteen thousand pounds. Eighteen. Thousand. Pounds. There are some houses that are actually on fire that cost more than that.
Ursula: Okay. But I want you to know that if anything goes wrong it'll be your fault. I'm holding you responsible.
Pel: Just so long as you're holding me, my darling.

Ursula: I'm pregnant.
Pel: Phew, thank God. I was beginning to think all of that sex was for nothing.

--a real estate agent tearing hundreds of pounds from our hands for doing next to nothing then laughing brayingly into our upturned faces before striding away to push small children into canals.

I'm not really a thinking ahead kind of person. (Though if you want someone to brood over the past, I'm your man).

Job interviews are unfalteringly horrid, but internal ones emphatically more so. For a start, all the sustaining fabrication that is normally the essence of interview technique is denied you as everyone knows precisely what you're like. You're also wearing a suit but aren't creating any smart impression; everyone knows you normally turn up looking like a week-old lettuce.
(during interview) I made little quotation marks with my fingers, the motion simultaneously waving goodbye to my immortal soul.

Improvement Day was a time set aside for all those Learning Center staff to meet without the pressures of day-to-day work. Everyone despised it with a sulfurous passion. Last year, because the date of it had leaked out in advance, Bernard arrived to find almost everyone had called in sick or reported they had a domestic crisis.

I was sitting in the office preparing some student usage figures that were part of the department's monitoring process (these are rather important for planning purposes, so I was putting quite a bit of effort into inventing convincing numbers).

(grocery store) The woman in front of me took some separators from their special slidey groove and divided her shopping into three eight-item-or-less chunks. I literally stopped breathing. There's a hypnotic quality to insouciant depravity on this level.

Roo shrugged. "It's hardly a great surprise that they (married couple) don't argue. I think you'll find that to have a personality clash people need to have personalities."

(parent-teacher conferences). Pel to Ursula: We're not going to ask to see their teaching qualifications again, it's embarrassing.
Ursula: Did I tell you what Vanessa's been doing at work?
Pel: Not for almost a day. The uncertainty has been playing on my mind.

(sex should not be described as "fun") The one thing guranteed to stop sex dead in its tracks is a laugh. Well, arse to that. Most stuff isn't fun; the world is eighty percent misery, suffering, injustice and gnawing existential bleakness. A further seventeen percent is sheer, suffocating boredom.

(ab-roller) This was still, like all exercise, deeply, deeply boring.

As I understand it, a midlife crisis is when you feel that your life is slipping away from you; you've achieved nothing and Death is starting to tap his foot impatiently. Well, I've felt like that since I was about seven years old. I am immune from a sudden attack of midlife crisis, because I've been having one since before I hit puberty.

mafioso guy: What's your phone number?
Pel: I laughed. No...mobile phones are for wankers.

Ursula: Who's moving in then?[as renters]
Pel: Just some women.
Ursula: Why women?
Pel: Um, their genes, I suppose.

(car chase) Looked like it was going to be a bit of a laugh, obviously, but then slipped imperceptibly into a seemingly ceaseless and harrowing dance with death during which I was only able to keep my sanity by focusing on the struggle to avoid soiling myself.

Love and Other Near-Death Experiences (same author)

"It's easy to be brave when you're suicidal, isn't it?"

Rob: "I mean, you read books. You're 'bookish'. Aren't books and sex pretty much an either-or choice?"
Elizabeth: "A notion that could only possibly have gestated in the low-ceilinged brain of someone who doesn't read enough books. Just think of Emily Bronte, for example: psychotically bookish -- but was there ever a woman screaming out so loudly for a good shagging? I even suspect that's why Wuthering Heights carries on decades too long rather than sensibly drawing the curtains a little after Cathy's death. It was Bronte saying, 'Look, I'm simply going to keep on writing this stuff until someone comes and shags me raw.'"

Stephen Fry

From Moab is my Washpot, his autobiography.

Music is the deepest of the arts and deep beneath all arts. --E.M.Forster

Music was a kind of penetration. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. Music in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar, or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Nothing else comes close.