Jacob Wren

“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

"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

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

• Mina Loy

"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

"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

“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

“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

"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

"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

The willingness to still learn things from people you disagree with.

I think there is much to be said for listening, realizing you are wrong about something, publicly admitting it, and changing your thinking.

"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

“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

"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

To let the book ferment in my head for years and years before I actually start writing it.

"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

“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

Your semi-regular reminder that I have a new book out. The title is Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim. It is a different kind of anti-war novel, and I find myself wishing it wasn't quite so relevant at this particular moment: https://radicalcut.blogspot.com/2024/11/some-press-quotes-for-dry-your-tears-to.html

"Schools help obscure the aristocratic quality to American life. They do so by converting birthrights (which we all think are unfair) into credentials (which have the appearance of merit)."
- Shamus Khan

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

“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

"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