JOHN CURRIN

"I’d like to get the sex thing over with, but I realized I’m not done with it."

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

"The singers had bad skin or wore boots. Song after song throbbed with secret pain."

PETER SOTOS

"Once again, I think there is little art being done that really owns up to such intense possibilities."

CHALMERS JOHNSON

"History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless."

BRET EASTON ELLIS

"... where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change, or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a look or a feeling or a gesture, or receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term 'generosity of spirit' applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire-meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in... this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged."

BRET EASTON ELLIS

"Blair got tan and so did I, and by the end of the week, all we did was watch television, even though the reception wasn’t too good, and drink bourbon, and Blair would arrange shells into circular patterns on the floor of the living room."

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

"A confession has to be part of your new life."

GUY HOCQUENGHEM

"So I had seen him again, and nothing had happened because I didn't have the guts to speak to him. Someone else had taken him away, which I had never imagined possible. Someone who'd become completely indispensable to him, in his mind, someone who might have been me."

JOAN DIDION

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

PAUL BOWLES

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."