Derfner's Quotes

#1. If, as Marshall McLuhan once taught us, the medium is the message, then Derfner's medium-this lovely, discursive amalgamation of wit and smarts-is indeed his message about how to stay happy, sane, and honest in whatever situation one finds oneself in.

Philip Gambone

#2. Love- if not reciprocated, comes with an expiry date, no matter how strongly we beg to differ.

Manish Pathania

#3. Did you just say you
Think Mansfield Park is boring?
Get out of my house.

Joel Derfner

#4. The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.

Alexander Chee

#5. People would rather earn 60 grand in an area where their neighbours earn 40, than earn 80 in an area where their neighbours earn a hundred.

John Lanchester

#6. I love my life because a part of me has learned how to give up hope, and that, I suspect, is a dangerous lesson to unlearn.

Joel Derfner

#7. In intimate conversation I am as supportive and positive as the next man, but gatherings of happy people make me miserable. I long to share in the collective joy, but instead I am racked with anxiety.

Joel Derfner

#8. People aren't tidy creations to be stacked neatly in the Tupperware or poured in premeasured quantities from a box into the Cuisinart with no spills; everybody alive is a lost and disastrous mess.

Joel Derfner

#9. There are two differences between an orgy and a sex club. First, at a sex club it's considered bad form to introduce yourself to someone before you start putting parts of his body in your mouth. At an orgy you are allowed to offer your name as long as you do so with an obvious sense of irony.

Joel Derfner

#10. Life is always uncertain,'he said with a shrug. 'We cannot let the fear of what might happen stop us living as we choose.

Susanna Kearsley

#11. The first stone was just tried in the spirit of experimentation. The opening of the stone was far more interesting than the drawing that I had done on it.

Andy Goldsworthy

#12. I had never before seen somebody I admired understand what was expected of him, choose to act otherwise, and be happier for it. For the first time in my life I realized that it was possible to reinvent oneself.

Joel Derfner

#13. Everybody alive is a lost and disastrous mess ... the scattered moments of kinship we feel with others are, when reduced to their most basic elements, accidental discoveries of kinship with ourselves.

Joel Derfner

#14. But I could not bear to look into this man's eyes any longer and see such voracious need, because what if I realized that I was standing in front of a mirror?

Joel Derfner

#15. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we'd never sleep ever again.

Ali Smith

#16. At the time he seemed both ancient and French, but the wisdom that has come with age tells me he was thirty-two and faking the accent.

Joel Derfner

#17. My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.

Walter Becker

#18. For the most part I felt nothing but scorn for an art form that required the pretense that it was natural for people to communicate with one another in rhymed song.

Joel Derfner

#19. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all?

William Shakespeare

#20. There shall be no more sin, neither shall there beany more death.

Ellen G. White