Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one’s core.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s...

Pues yo me hago tres preguntas muy simples: ,Cómo ha obtenido ese poder? ,Cómo lo está utilizando? Y: ,cómo se le puede arrebatar al muy hijo de puta?

Scholars discern motions of history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes?...

I think about pinball, and how being a kid’s like being shot up the firing lane and there’s no veering left or right; you’re just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like...

Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.

On bad days you wonder, ‘Why not just back off from the war and lead a quiet metalife?

Go on, my dear,” urges the snake. “Take one. Hear it? ‘Pluck me,’ it’s saying. That big, shiny red one. ‘Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard.’ You know you want to.””But God,”...

Birdsong foamed in the hour-before-dawn garden.

The art teacher’s scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. ‘As the title suggests,’ Mr Dunwoody saw the book’d caught my attention, ‘it’s about the history of opticians. What are you...

Life’s more science-fictiony by the day.

Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don’t respect cowards.

La segunda ley de la supervivencia afirma que no existe una segunda ley. O comes o te comen. Punto.

I’d always worried but kissing’s not so tricky. Your lips know what to do, just like sea anenomes know what to do. Kissing spins you, like Flying Tea-Cups. Oxygen the girl breathes out, you breathe...

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people’s women who pay the most.

I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head....

A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.

A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synaesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardise...

… but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about...

…if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.

How gleefully life shreds our well crafted plans.

Fantasy. Lunacy.All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will...

I’d love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I’d love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to...

On, the V-word! Here it comes again.

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.

The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much....

Había leído lo bastante como para apreciar mi ingenio literario, pero no lo bastante como para identificar mis fuentes de conocimiento. Me encantan las mujeres así. Podía decirle cosas como: “La principal diferencia entre la...

Hell is hell because, there, evil passes unremarked upon.

People’re always buried facing west, so at the end of time when the Last Trumpet blows, all the dead people’ll claw their way up and walk due west to the throne of Jesus to be...

(…)si nos convencemos de que la humanidad puede trascender colmillos y garras, si nos convencemos de que las diversas razas y credos pueden compartir pacíficamente la tierra, (…)si nos convencemos de que los gobernantes deben...

The Revelation of Sonmi 451 To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences...

Have you noticed,” said John, “how countries call theirs ‘sovereign nuclear deterrents,’ but call the other countries’ ones ‘weapons of mass destruction’?

What?

Tokyo is a model of that serial big-bang theory of the universe. It explodes at five P.M. and people matter is hurled to the suburbs, but by 5 A.M. the people-matter gravity reasserts itself, and...

And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.

Patience’s design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless...

Answering the question ‘How would you like to smell?’ by saying ‘I’d rather I didn’t’ is also no longer acceptable. It’s not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic...

Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it.

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods’ conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror.”I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might...

Power. What do we mean? ‘The ability to determine another man’s luck.’ …how is it that some men attain mastery over others while the vast majority live and die as minions, as livestock? The answer...

Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.

Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. “Oy!” yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. “There’s a fackin’ queue!”Never apologize, advises Lloyd George....

Lying’s wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.

Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!”How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves...

I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.

A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant

Las autobiografías ya de por sí son infumables, ¡pero anda que las novelitas! Héroe emprende viaje, forastero llega a la ciudad, alguien persigue algo, lo consigue o no lo consigue, conflicto entre voluntades opuestas. “Admiradme,...