The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.
I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai.
In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares no...
When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, pai...
The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is...
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abst...
I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?
There's a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.
There are signs, I think, that people aren't satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour their next car will be.
Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's g...
I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.
I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some def...
People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they're somehow discovering reality, but of course that's just another fiction dreamed up by a TV...
Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scan...
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is...
