James Purdy Quotes

#1. Don't you believe in death?" I yelled at him. "No," he answers, "and I don't believe in time either ...

James Purdy

#2. Never deprecate another person's sufferings even when imaginary.

James Purdy

#3. If the book's bad enough, they'll publish it, and if it's bad bad enough, the daily reviewers will love it, and it'll sell.

James Purdy

#4. The last human of importance the American people have been able to keep in the working end of their brain is your own Chicago triggerman, Dillinger. After him they kind of lost hold on keeping who's who straight. So don't be surprised if they don't remember who Cabot Wright is, or if they do.

James Purdy

#5. I wish people would call poisons poison. I don't mind people smoking marijuana, but they should admit it's a poison, and coffee's a poison, but the Americans lie so.

James Purdy

#6. Not all princes he had read about in books of legends are beautiful and noble and carry their heads high.

James Purdy

#7. I don't think it's like eastern mysticism, which leaves the person whole. It's really another form of cancer, television.

James Purdy

#8. Great books, if long enough and full of topical description and contemporary comment, were now coming into even wider public favor. The lengthier and fuller of comment, the better.

James Purdy

#9. The worse the author, the more he is known.

James Purdy

#10. She was a church open only for him, with services in full operation twenty-four hours a day.

James Purdy

#11. Actually, television tells you to take dope. It tells you to destroy the human race really, by first having more consumers and then consuming more poison and then making the whole planet uninhabitable.

James Purdy

#12. But failure has kept Curt at home like a nice warm dachshund.

James Purdy

#13. My idea of heaven is to be hunting with you in some beautiful park with mountains like here at home but where we won't need guns or prey but we will just walk together arm in arm in this good world and be by ourselves always together forever and a day.

James Purdy

#14. The to-dos were sordid rather than exciting, perhaps because nearly everybody was approaching middle age.

James Purdy

#15. There was the cruel kind of Eustace silence.

James Purdy

#16. The public is totally illiterate in America. It can't read at all. It's absolutely insensitive to words.

James Purdy

#17. There are no manners left in America at all, because all you're doing is kicking the person next to you so that you can consume more, see more, and get more.

James Purdy

#18. I don't have any home. Everyone I grew up with, my family, are all dead. So I feel kind of like a ghost. I'm more interested in the past.

James Purdy

#19. Carla had the American woman's fixed idea that love can cure, love can heal, love can bind a flowing wound.

James Purdy

#20. There's really nothing wrong with sentimentality ... Nothing I wrote is sentimental.

James Purdy

#21. Feeling is taboo, especially in New York. I read in some little magazine the other day that The New Yorker and The New York Times were sclerotic, meaning, "completely turned to rock." The critics here are that way.

James Purdy

#22. Television masturbates its audience even though the audience is not really watching. It masturbates orifices the audience doesn't have. It sticks holes in the viewer and masturbates in those holes. Then it finally gets into the brain and masturbates there, too.

James Purdy

#23. Most people have their buttons, Eustace continued.

James Purdy

#24. Ace sat down and inflated his cheeks like the wind gods in Italian paintings.

James Purdy

#25. If you get lonesome enough, Carrie knew, you'll even call the police.

James Purdy

#26. Most journalists are broken down alcoholics.

James Purdy

#27. If you're a writer, you have to be an egomaniac. You have to just believe in yourself, which is hard work.

James Purdy

#28. Some people confess in the flesh, others on paper.

James Purdy

#29. I've never been in fashion. Not at all.

James Purdy

#30. The New York Times is the worst newspaper in the world and it's extremely vicious to artists.

James Purdy

#31. New York has collapsed.

James Purdy

#32. Nobody can cause another man evil unless the second party involved allows him to.

James Purdy

#33. Most books don't even come into the world with the noise of the still-born.

James Purdy

#34. In a competitive society, the thing people fear the most is love.

James Purdy

#35. None of my books are best-sellers. In fact, the only thing that's kept me alive is the books that are in paperback. People find them, they like them, and they pass them on.

James Purdy

#36. New York establishment isn't really a literary establishment. It's just a collection of broken down old newspaper hacks who pass judgment on books that they have not even read, with assuredness of Jehova.

James Purdy

#37. Amos, talk about pearls for teeth ... you got 'em. No wonder the boys go for you, because I could too and if I had something to push between those pearly teeth I'd be first in line.

James Purdy

#38. The New York Times Review of Books is toilet paper. Used.

James Purdy

#39. You fucked-up hunk.

James Purdy

#40. I think America, really, is over.

James Purdy

#41. For imagine having somebody beside you day and night loving you and forgiving you and petting you forever and ever, that must be a better description of hell than being put into a boiling lake or cauldron of ice that burnt your black.

James Purdy

#42. Don't shoot me, Sidney, I love you.
He had shot him right through the words that still haunted him today, the most perfect words ever said to him.

James Purdy

#43. Publishers seem to be in an alcoholic haze most of the time. Well, the publishers have no idea what a writer is.

James Purdy

#44. I don't think of people as queer or straight," the Doc said. "Not when you're as old as I. And I don't think God does either."
"I didn't know you believed in God, Doc," Vance said.

James Purdy

#45. He's America in action - opposed to quality.

James Purdy

#46. Margaret Meade is always running around saying that marijuana's just like bread and water! Well, bread and water are poison, and marijuana's a poison. Now, if you like poison, why shouldn't you have it? But don't try to pretend that it's innocuous.

James Purdy

#47. All you need do, Bernie,"she gulped her toast soaked in coffee, "is present the truth as fiction.

James Purdy

#48. No one looks at a television, and no one hears it. It's a poison.

James Purdy

#49. I don't think I'd like it if people liked me, I'd think that something had gone wrong.

James Purdy

#50. I have wrote my name in hell, Brian McFee had said as he was dying on the sawdust of the floor in the Bent Ridge Tavern.

James Purdy

#51. One fine day you've got to give your body to somebody, or turn into a fully-fledged zombie.

James Purdy

#52. It was paper, as he had once joked to Amos, that he was really queer for.

James Purdy

#53. Almost everything official in America is a huge fraud.

James Purdy

#54. I am against all machines. It's no wonder that so many Americans go on dope when they have no other cultural stimulus than a television.

James Purdy

#55. Why, if Daniel Haws was to take out his naked cock and shake it in your face, you'd die of apoplexy.

James Purdy

#56. I can describe my books as I seem them as American, imaginative, symbolic. My literary ancestors are two other Calvinists, Hawthorne, and Melville.

James Purdy

#57. Mexican marijuana, which he called the schoolboy's consolation.

James Purdy

#58. And yet Curt's a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that's all.

James Purdy

#59. Why should you expect everything to work out successful? You're old enough to know better.

James Purdy

#60. I think fame is something that you've achieved in your inner self that becomes known to others outside you. There are really very few famous people in history.

James Purdy

#61. She made no point of concealing the truth, for the truth was all she could bear now.

James Purdy

#62. Just like children, he and the greatwoman Grainger longed, and especially demanded even, that something should happen, or again Parkhearst would cry, "A reward, I must have a reward. A reward for life just as I have lived it.

James Purdy

#63. Writing is like a battle. You're often so into it you don't have any high ideals. You're just doing it. I have all these boxing prints on my walls. I always feel that's what I am, a boxer. I get my brains knocked out every so often.

James Purdy

#64. Maureen had been born with the face of a gargoyle on the body of a sylph.

James Purdy

#65. Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the girders of an ancient bridge is the skeleton of a child which superstition says keeps the bridge standing.

James Purdy

#66. The world is telling you through The New York Times and The New York Review of Books "You must shut up. You must never appear again. Because you are not relevant to us." So you have to fight their attempt to destroy you, fight to continue feeling.

James Purdy