“Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
“There can be no doubt that American literature has considerably suffered from the platitudinous didactic note.” — George S. Hellman, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Book III, Ch. XIII, Sec. 16
“A functioning police state needs no police.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (emphasis in original)
“Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
“Honor is conscious and willing loyalty to the highest inward leading. It is the quality which cannot be insulted.” — George William Curtis (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XIII, Sec. 4)
“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life–and herein lies its secret–takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim)
“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.” — Milan Hubl (quoted in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Heim)
“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim)
“Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: 1. a high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; 2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; 3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim)
“Police files are our only claim to immortality.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim)
“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim)
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim)
“Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.” — Teju Cole, Open City
“If you’re too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too.” — Teju Cole, Open City
“There is always a bull market for vengeance and violence in America.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“Different people want different things in this world, and you have to be careful about taking risks. Hungry people have the cunning of wild beasts. A thing that seemed strange and wrong yesterday can seem perfectly reasonable tomorrow, or vice versa.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“Everybody you see these days might have the power to get you locked up…. Who knows why? They will have reasons straight out of some horrible Kafka story, but in the end it won’t matter any more than a full moon behind clouds.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear (ellipsis in original)
“Vicious thieves have always ruled the world.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“Never believe the first thing an FBI agent tells you about anything–especially not if he seems to believe you are guilty of a crime. Maybe he has no evidence. Maybe he’s bluffing. Maybe you are innocent. Maybe. The Law can be hazy on these things.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“The only real difference between the Sane and the Insane, in this world, is the Sane have the power to have the Insane locked up.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“Every once in a while, but not often, you can sit down and write a thing that you know is going to stand people’s hair on end for the rest of their lives—a perfect memory of some kind, like a vision, and you can see the words rolling out of your fingers and bouncing around for a while like wild little jewels before they finally roll into place & line up just exactly like you wanted them to…. Wow! Look at that shit! Who wrote that stuff? What? Me? Hot damn!” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it into the object of our game; to turn it into a toy.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“It has been extremely lucky that up to now wars have been fought only by men. If they had been fought by women, they would have been so consistently cruel that today there wouldn’t be a single human being left on the planet.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“If our lives were endless, like the lives of the gods of antiquity, the concept of episode would lose its meaning, for in infinity every event, no matter how trivial, would meet up with its consequence and unfold into a story.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“No episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure. Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“Life is as stuffed with episodes as a mattress is with horsehair, but a poet (according to Aristotle) is not an upholsterer and must remove all stuffing from his story, even though real life consists of nothing but precisely such stuffing.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“In Aristotle’s Poetics, the episode is an important concept. Aristotle did not like episodes. According to him, an episode, from the point of view of poetry, is the worst possible type of event. It is neither an unavoidable consequence of preceding action nor the cause of what is to follow: it is outside the causal chain of events that is the story. It is merely a sterile accident that can be left out without making the story lose its intelligible continuity and is incapable of making a permanent mark upon the life of the characters.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“Isn’t the cause of most bad paintings and bad novels simply the fact that artists consider their passion for art something holy, some sort of mission if not duty (duty to oneself, even to mankind)?” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)