James Purdy Quotes

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

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.

Almost everything official in America is a huge fraud.

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

Most journalists are broken down alcoholics.

I think America, really, is over.

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

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

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

The worse the author, the more he is known.

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.

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.

There's the world of the newspapers. They believe that what is happening is happening, which is so naïve. Because they're the first to turn on that.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

He’s America in action — opposed to quality.

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

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.

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.

There was the cruel kind of Eustace silence.

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

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

Never deprecate another person's sufferings even when imaginary.