James Purdy Quotes

Most people have their buttons, Eustace continued.

Actually, television tells you to take dope. It tells you to destroy the human race really, by first having more consumers and then consuming more poison and then making the whole planet uninhabitable.

All you need do, Bernie,"she gulped her toast soaked in coffee, "is present the truth as fiction.

I think America, really, is over.

I don't think it's like eastern mysticism, which leaves the person whole. It's really another form of cancer, television.

As always, I wonder if I'll get through the winter. Then when winter is over, I wonder about the summer. But that's because the system decided which author shall be commercially successful. As I said, the most vicious of them all is The New York Times, because it pretends to be literary and impartial, and it's really this opinionated, myopic, stupid giant of incompetence.

Feeling is taboo, especially in New York. I read in some little magazine the other day that The New Yorker and The New York Times were sclerotic, meaning, "completely turned to rock." The critics here are that way.

Almost everything official in America is a huge fraud.

I don't think of people as queer or straight," the Doc said. "Not when you're as old as I. And I don't think God does either."
"I didn't know you believed in God, Doc," Vance said.

I can describe my books as I seem them as American, imaginative, symbolic. My literary ancestors are two other Calvinists, Hawthorne, and Melville.

If you're a writer, you have to be an egomaniac. You have to just believe in yourself, which is hard work.

She made no point of concealing the truth, for the truth was all she could bear now.

You fucked-up hunk.

The world is telling you through The New York Times and The New York Review of Books "You must shut up. You must never appear again. Because you are not relevant to us." So you have to fight their attempt to destroy you, fight to continue feeling.

Writing is like a battle. You're often so into it you don't have any high ideals. You're just doing it. I have all these boxing prints on my walls. I always feel that's what I am, a boxer. I get my brains knocked out every so often.

Then giving another taste to his drink, leaving it more than half full, he would make a rather stately progress to the booth, partly closing the door. He would take down the receiver and hesitantly begin speaking into the mouthpiece. Actually Mr. Sendel was talking only to himself. He would talk for several minutes into the silent phone, explaining how worried he was and how despairing it was at his time of life when all or almost all those dear to one have departed.

My idea of heaven is to be hunting with you in some beautiful park with mountains like here at home but where we won't need guns or prey but we will just walk together arm in arm in this good world and be by ourselves always together forever and a day.

Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the girders of an ancient bridge is the skeleton of a child which superstition says keeps the bridge standing.

Carla had the American woman's fixed idea that love can cure, love can heal, love can bind a flowing wound.

The worse the author, the more he is known.

The public is totally illiterate in America. It can't read at all. It's absolutely insensitive to words.

Most journalists are broken down alcoholics.

He stood there, his eyes like they had been before. Their beauty stabbed at her heart like a great knife; the hair looked so like she had just pressed the wet comb to it and perhaps put a little pomade on the sides; and the small face was clean and sad. Yet her arms somehow did not ache to hold him like her heart told her they should. Something too far away and too strong was between her and him; she only saw him as she had always seen resurrection pictures, hidden from us as in a wonderful mist that will not let us see our love complete.

Some people confess in the flesh, others on paper.

She was a church open only for him, with services in full operation twenty-four hours a day.

I think fame is something that you've achieved in your inner self that becomes known to others outside you. There are really very few famous people in history.

The New York Times is the worst newspaper in the world and it's extremely vicious to artists.

Publishers seem to be in an alcoholic haze most of the time. Well, the publishers have no idea what a writer is.

Curt, my husband, is a writer, and he'll never write again. That's our funeral, as they say down south. Now in your case, my pet, you're married to a phenomenon of our own special epoch, a man who couldn't in a thousand years be a writer in the only meaning of the term, but who can and probably will write a book.

And yet Curt's a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that's all.

It was paper, as he had once joked to Amos, that he was really queer for.

Great books, if long enough and full of topical description and contemporary comment, were now coming into even wider public favor. The lengthier and fuller of comment, the better.

New York establishment isn't really a literary establishment. It's just a collection of broken down old newspaper hacks who pass judgment on books that they have not even read, with assuredness of Jehova.

I've never been in fashion. Not at all.

I am against all machines. It's no wonder that so many Americans go on dope when they have no other cultural stimulus than a television.

There are no manners left in America at all, because all you're doing is kicking the person next to you so that you can consume more, see more, and get more.

If the book's bad enough, they'll publish it, and if it's bad bad enough, the daily reviewers will love it, and it'll sell.

I wish people would call poisons poison. I don't mind people smoking marijuana, but they should admit it's a poison, and coffee's a poison, but the Americans lie so.

I don't think I'd like it if people liked me, I'd think that something had gone wrong.

Mexican marijuana, which he called the schoolboy's consolation.

There's really nothing wrong with sentimentality ... Nothing I wrote is sentimental.

Nobody can cause another man evil unless the second party involved allows him to.

Television masturbates its audience even though the audience is not really watching. It masturbates orifices the audience doesn't have. It sticks holes in the viewer and masturbates in those holes. Then it finally gets into the brain and masturbates there, too.

Never deprecate another person's sufferings even when imaginary.

I have wrote my name in hell, Brian McFee had said as he was dying on the sawdust of the floor in the Bent Ridge Tavern.

One fine day you've got to give your body to somebody, or turn into a fully-fledged zombie.

There was the cruel kind of Eustace silence.

Most books don't even come into the world with the noise of the still-born.