Andrei Codrescu Quotes

The time has come for writers to become inaccessible again. The reason is not some kind of 'mystique' that makes people curious (though it helps), but the fact that no real writers ever lay down anything real in public-they work in solitude, they think hard, and their thoughts are rarely nice or 'friendly.'

It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold.

These are the poems of a traveler and a lover who feels both the terror of time passing and the consolation of eternity. From such tension spring lovely poetic objects, ready for intelligent use.

The fact is we all know that there exists in the world an order different from that in which we pass our days. If we reveal its existence people think that we are crazy.

Our ancestors had fought and murdered one another, married and forged alliances, founded countries. At their best - but only for selfish reasons - they patronized art, literature, and music. But their worlds had to be overthrown by revolutions, because there was room in them only for themselves.

Poetry is again hip in America as people are beginning to refuse to die of boredom and to choke in the fog of their funny money.

...Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, a brilliant reenvisioning of one's own city as an exotic locale. Sue, who was too poor to travel, turned an awed gaze to the familiar and gave his readers a city they would recognize but which hid a poetry far from the familiar.

In the grand collage that is Dada, past and future are equally usable.

Romanians are culturally European, very close to the French. Socially, they are now building a society that is emotionally closer to the Balkans, Turkey and Greece.

The evaporation of 4 million who believe in this crap would leave the world a better place.

Romanians have a particular love for poetry and have a beautiful, vivid language. The poets they love are not versifiers like Vadim Tudor, but genuinely complex mystical souls like Mircea Cartarescu.

Americans are accustomed to welcoming, or at least receiving, refugees from other countries, not creating our own.

The peasants of all lands recognize power and they salute it, whether it's good or evil.

I knew there was something holding me here. It wasn't paprikash. Or nostalgia for my meager childhood...

...Somewhere in me a nearly voiceless child was asking to know the rest of the story that had been interrupted.

After so many years, I feel more American than anything else, but I'm also Romanian and whatever other oddities of temperament I picked up elsewhere, in Transylvania or France, for instance. These days, everybody is both an exile and a resident - they don't call it the global village for nothing.

The beauty of Molly's is that it is not, whether in the daytime or at night, the exclusive preserve of an age or income group. Unlike the sterile night scenes of pretentious San Francisco or New York, Molly's (and most other New Orleans bars) welcomes all ages, all colors, and all sexual persuasions, provided they are willing to surrender to the atmosphere.

Like Venice, Italy, this is a place of fleeting beauty. The knowledge that we won't be here long gives everyone an intense appetite for living.

Real artists free of the tedium of money can use, now, all of society as an idea factory.

There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.

The real secret, though, is that nobody belongs, whether they are natives or not. After expulsion from paradise all humans are in exile. You can be a Colonel Sanders chicken, born, raised and fried in one quarter of a square foot and you'll still be an outsider. The thing we call reality is a holding tank for people who must worry about belonging -- it's a worrier prison. Don't worry people! You'll soon be fried and eaten. A few of us are writers, hence double-alienated, but happier (because we are busy)
If it's true that many of us go through life feeling like we don't belong, could digression (geographical and otherwise) be our way of trying to forget, or to escape, that feeling?

Bad news: there are no digressions. Everything is connected in the whole darn ball of yarn: start pulling at any end and you'll get to the same place. On the other hand, most normal people dislike digression because they have to lose themselves to follow you. The surest way to drive your dear ones crazy is to digress. In private, it's an offense. In public it's "art," "performance.

As a newcomer I felt that this was indeed a blessed place, capable of unabashedly advertising its flaws, fearing no ridicule and no criticism. That, in essence, is the opposite of provincialism. The great cities of the world are not provincial: They invite complexity, not propaganda.

Most artists don't get paid for what they do, and they are lucky if they can persuade a friend to let them show something at a kid's birthday party.

Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share.

The internet liquefied physical borders faster than they were already doing on their own. For all that, there are only regional writers. There are no "internet writers," like there used to be "paperback writers." Every tweet comes from somewhere, and that "somewhere" goes into the "somewhere" where you're reading it in. You read Nietzsche in the Ozarks for a while, let's say, then you get up and sweep the leaves from your porch for a longer while. Place wins on time spent every time, unless you're demented enough to put out your eyes on screens longer than you sweep. We are in a state of "transitional regionalism," a place where regions are instantly transmitted to other regions, but they don't universalize them, they only make them more provincial, by framing them with the local.

Cookbooks bear the same relation to real books that microwave food bears to your grandmother?s.

eulogy for men

for ruxandra

men have doubles.
women don't.
men invent doubles for women so that they can both have a woman.
women pretend that they too have a double to please their double-man.
women may have many double-men who believe that they have a double-woman.
one woman can be the author of dozens of imaginary women for their many double-men.
one woman can make many women from stories.
eve had to make up lillith, sheherezade had to make up 1001 women
but there was only one eve and one sheherezade, the rest were men's dreams.
women invented speech to multiply themselves while also multiplying men.
women are the mothers of stories and the mothers of men.
poor men whose only gift is to listen and whose only strength is being two.

Death is not enough for such men. We must add mechanics

My mother and I were part of a deal in the mid-'60s between Romania and Israel. Israel bought freedom for Romanian Jews for $2,000 a head. Ceausescu made a bundle in hard currency. He also 'sold' ethnic Germans to West Germany. Instead of going to Israel, my mother and I came to the United States.

It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.

This is important, Your Honor, because it establishes the fact that language, like blood, is a living thing that proceeds forward in time.

The real technology -behind all our other technologies- is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.

The richness of our ethnic insults vocabulary was wide and deep. It reflected, all too easily, the more elaborate predjiduces of our parents (not my parents), which in their rabid form, had already resulted in tribal bloodbaths.

Our secrets, odd or not, are the pins that keep our inner life in place: the inform our psyche with meaning.

Still, there is something disappearing from the world, something composed of many instances of tradition and skill, or maybe not disappearing, but translating. Maybe culture, like physical matter, doesn't disappear, but is subject to infinite play, and th e world is a vast workshop for making and remaking everything, including people, and the engine of play is desire…

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

Nosferatu is the daddy of modern American sex.