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  “I am a real minimalist, because I don’t do very much. I know some minimalists who call themselves minimalist but they do loads of minimalism. That is cheating.” - Robert Wyatt

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  The fact that air and water are still sometimes free is a deep pain in the hearts of capitalists everywhere.

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  "No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons." – Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

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  “The writers Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond had a podcast called Dear Sugars. On one episode, a woman had written in seeking their advice, asking if her reaction to a painful situation had been wrong. Almond did not respond directly. Instead he said: ‘reading the letters we receive, I’m always struck by how much, and how quickly, people convert their pain into self-loathing.’ This stopped me cold.” – Sarah Krasnostein, The Believer

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  "My love is eternal and my train leaves in fifteen minutes." - Mina Loy

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  “The media simply can’t discuss a work of literature without pointing to some writer-hero. And yet there is no work of literature that is not the fruit of tradition, of many skills, of a sort of collective intelligence.” — Elena Ferrante

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  "There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter… Once I realized that, I had to be a writer… It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions." - Chinua Achebe

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  If you really want to understand something, try to change it.

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  "A day is nothing: there is just time to become yourself, and then night is upon you." – Petronio Álvarez

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  Society needs a way to effectively manage greed.

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  "I don’t care how much fuckin ‘magic’ is in a book, if it doesn’t attempt to reimagine the structures of our world but with every word enforces them, it’s about as magic as a breezeblock." – Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams, Diego Garcia

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  “Failure exists in Relation to goals. Nature has no goals and so can’t fail. Humans have goals, and so they have to fail. Often the wonderful configurations produced by failure reveal the pettiness of the goals. Of course we have to go on striving for success, otherwise we could not genuinely fail. If Buster Keaton wasn’t genuinely trying to put up his house it wouldn’t be funny when it falls down on him.” - Cornelius Cardew

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  “Cedric said something to them about the struggle being important, regardless of whether or not you are going to win. If it’s some kind of salvation you’re looking for, I don’t think it’s going to happen. It’s not like a football game that’s going to end with your team either winning or losing. We have to understand that there is value in trying, not in winning. It’s important to recognize small victories and celebrate them and one another.” – Elizabeth Robinson, The World We Want

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  I feel we continuously need to find ways of celebrating writers whose work we love away from prize culture. The books that win prizes have almost never worked for me, so I still feel there must be more ways for the books that do work for me to gain more traction.

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  "Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared." - Hannah Arendt, Lying in Politics

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  "I think the future is… well, as somebody said one time, ‘it’s out there.’ It’s not only out there, but it’s ready to be changed. It’s malleable, and there’s nothing fixed that you can’t unfix. But to unfix things that appear to be fixed, you have to not only be creative and imaginative, but courageously dedicated to the long haul." - Myles Horton

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  Your semi-regular reminder that I have a new book out. The title is Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim and it got some really nice reviews: https://radicalcut.blogspot.com/2024/11/some-press-quotes-for-dry-your-tears-to.html

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  Be the elephant you wish to see in the room.

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  "Well, Genet had a phrase that I repeat often: ‘Difficulty is an author’s respect for the reader’, or rather, making him or her think, collaborate – the work is incomplete without the reader’s input…" - Juan Goytisolo

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  "To be making something as yet unformed, unknown – to be living in a deferred moment–is the most seductive way to exist." - Moyra Davey

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  “He said that one of his goals had been to be both original and not, since that was one possible definition of literature and even of art…” – Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

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  "Lacan does not dismiss the belief in chance, number and randomness as superstition but sees it as the path toward the unconscious. Following this insight, we might draw some conclusions about the political unconscious of an electoral democracy based on number games and see it as the latest divinational technology of the ruling class in modern guise." – Lydia H. Liu, The Freudian Robot

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  “And how this happened for me too – twenty years ago, when my chronic pain first became debilitating and I couldn’t write like I used to, in frantic bursts trying to get everything out. So I decided to write a few sentences a day, with no intention of plot or structure, and after a few years I was shocked to find I had over four hundred pages. And that text became my second novel.” ― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Touching the Art

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  “History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.” - James Baldwin, Dark Days

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  "But it turns out even if you go somewhere intending to discover only your own ignorance you still turn out to be differently ignorant than you thought." - Hannah Black, Dark Pool Party

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  "Places that don’t exist have something in common: They’re real. / Places that do exist aren’t so real after awhile." - Pere Ubu, Fortunate Son

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  “It is true that I am endowed with an absurd sensitiveness; what scratches others tears me to pieces.” - Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to George Sand, 10th May 1875

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  "What if it were the other way around? What if the faculty of storytelling were not specifically human but rather the last remnant of our animal selves?" - Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island

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  "The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it - I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics is hopeless." - Hayao Miyazaki

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  “But for me, success is not a public thing. It’s a private thing. It’s when you have fewer and fewer regrets.” - Toni Morrison