Category Archives: quotes

Your House Is Burning

To start announcing your own preferences for old values when your world is collapsing and everything is changing at a furious pitch: this is not the act of a serious person. It is frivolous, fatuous. If you were to knock on the door of one of these critics and say ‘Sir, there are flames leaping out of your roof, your house is burning,’ under these conditions he would then say to you, ‘That’s a very interesting point of view. Personally, I couldn’t disagree with you more.’

That’s all these critics are saying. Their house is burning and they’re saying, ‘Don’t you have any sense of values, simply telling people about fire when you should be thinking about the serious content, the noble works of the mind?’

—Marshall McLuhan on his new media-phobic critics

(Via Jay Rosen.)

Cf. The Exact Opposite Is True

Hooked

Sontag: I don’t own a camera. I’m a photograph junkie, but I don’t want to take them.
New Boston Review: Why?
Sontag: Perhaps I might really get hooked.

(Via.)

How to Handle Criticism Like Robert Mitchum

DIANE
What do you know about scenery, or beauty, or any of the things that make life worth living? You’re just an animal — coarse, muscled, and barbaric.

MAX
You keep right on talking, honey. I like the way you run me down like that.

—Barrie Chase and Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear (1962)

Delusional and Stupid

It is both delusional and stupid to think that clothes don’t really matter and we should all wear whatever we want.

G. Bruce Boyer

“Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.”

From Andy Warhol’s Tuesday, 9 October 1984 diary entry. It’s Sean Lennon’s 9th birthday party.

We went into Sean’s bedroom – and there was a kid there setting up an Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, “Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.” And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color. And then Keith and Kenny used it. Keith had already used it once to make a T-shirt, but Kenny was using it for the first time, and I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.

(Via.)

Migraine Personality

All of us who have migraine suffer not only from the attacks themselves but from this common conviction that we are perversely refusing to cure ourselves by taking a couple of aspirin, that we are making ourselves sick, that we ‘bring it on ourselves.’ And in the most immediate sense, the sense of why we have a headache this Tuesday and not last Thursday, of course we often do. There certainly is what doctors call a ‘migraine personality,’ and that personality tends to be ambitious, inward, intolerant of error, rather rigidly organized, perfectionist. ‘You don’t look like a migraine personality,’ a doctor once said to me. ‘Your hair’s messy. But I suppose you’re a compulsive housekeeper.’ Actually my house is kept even more negligently than my hair, but the doctor was right nonetheless: perfectionism can also take the form of spending most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph.

—Joan Didion, “In Bed,” The White Album (1979)

University Towns

I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls.

—T. S. Eliot

(Via.)

All Technologies Are Faustian Bargins

(Via Nick Wooster.)

Educate Yourself

I did not finish high school, I didn’t even complete the tenth grade, and throughout my whole life, I’ve read extensively – it’s how I’ve educated myself.

Doyald Young

(Via Brain Pickings.)

On Not Tweeting

Someone has to not be tweeting all the time, someone has to be thinking about things which need a long attention span and trying to organise material and build up strong foundations instead of rushing off across the frontier. It takes a long time to put out something that has the right style; I have to really think about it and if I’m going to do it right I have to spend a lot of time focussed on it.

Donald Knuth