The wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as fo...r externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I became increasingly anarchistic. I began to find people of my own class vicious, people in clean collars uninteresting. I even a...ccepted smells, personal as well as official. Everyone who came to the studio smelled either of machine oil or herring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even bellig...erence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than ...forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and t...hat the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention.... A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philtre, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed, ...and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accept...ed and will continue to accept.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognised as such because it h...as achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »