The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bog...us enthusiasm, the constant drinking and drabbing, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it ... try to fake three laughs in an hour--ha ha ha ha ha--they'll t...ake you away, man. You can't.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any ...more than you can fake a good meal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. Even what they eat and drink, these palefaces who don't know what wine is ... their ugliness ... their p...ink sausage skin, horrible, they only live because there is penicillin,... the world as an Americanized vacuum ... their fake health, their fake youthfulness ... the way they use cosmetics even on corpses, their whole pornographic attitude to death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourse...lf to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the elusive, fake, and never attained reward which, for the benefit and amusement of... our masters, keeps us running and thinking in safe circles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrar...iness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And I finally understood what a Negro is: both wind and sail at the same time, drummer and dancer, a first-class fake who forces h...imself to gather basketsful of the sweetness that falls from the sky in some places, and that sweetness that does not fall on him, he makes it up, and that at least is what he has, if he has nothing else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »