I began to get up at two or three in the morning and work for twelve to fifteen hours a day. I'd get so emotionally drained by the writing, that I'd feel sick at the end of the day. My family became worried about me and they invited a friend, who was a writer in Los Angeles, to see me. He told me that he'd heard how serious I was about my writing, so he was willing to take a little time off of his busy schedule to glance at my work. I gave him the latest version of my manuscript. He took it home and came back to see me the following week. His face was long. He told me that he was sorry to say this but, as a family friend, he had the obligation to be truthful, so he'd tell me straight out that I had no talent. The book was terrible. And also, I was trying to write way beyond my mental capabilities.
Victor VillaseñorRelated topics
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As late as 1959, a friend and colleague of Albert Schweitzer defended his unsterile hospital in the following terms: Now to the domestic animals at the Hospital. People have been shocked by the informality with which animals and people mix, and although it is perhaps not always defensible on hygienic grounds, the mixture adds considerably to the charm of the place. The writer was a dental surgeon from New York, who would obviously have had a fit if a goat or chicken had wandered into his New York surgery. He knew full well that at Schweitzer's hospital "the goats, dogs and cats visit hospital wards teeming with microbial life of the most horrifying varieties,” but he defended their habitation with Africans because that was part of the culture and charm that had to be preserved!
Walter Rodney
"I'll be going now," she said.
Shinji made no answer and a surprised look came over his face. He had caught sight of a black streak that ran straight across the front of her red sweater.
Hatsue followed his gaze and saw the dirty smudge, just in the spot where she had been leaning her breast against the concrete parapet. Bending her head, she started slapping her breast with her open hands. Beneath her sweater, which all but seemed to be concealing some firm supports, two gently swelling mounds were set to trembling ever so slightly by the brisk brushing of her hands.
Shinji stared in wonder. Struck by her hands, the breasts seemed more like two small, playful animals. The boy was deeply stirred by the resilient softness of their movement.
The streak of dirt was finally brushed out.
Yukio Mishima
At present, I am particularly excited by 'bad taste'. I have the deep feeling that there exists in the very essence of bad taste a power capable of creating those things situated far beyond what is traditionally termed 'The Work of Art'. I wish to play with human feeling, with its 'morbidity' in a cold and ferocious manner. Only very recently I have become a sort of gravedigger of art (oddly enough, I am using the very terms of my enemies). Some of my latest works have been coffins and tombs. During the same time I succeeded in painting with fire, using particularly powerful and searing gas flames, some of them measuring three to four meters high. I use these to bathe the surface of the painting in such a way that it registered the spontaneous trace of fire.
Yves Klein
When they'd gone the old man turned around to watch the sun's slow descent. The Boat of Millions of Years, he thought; the boat of the dying sungod Ra, tacking down the western sky to the source of the dark river that runs through the underworld from west to east, through the twelve hours of the night, at the far eastern end of which the boat will tomorrow reappear, bearing a once again youthful, newly reignited sun.
Or, he thought bitterly, removed from us by a distance the universe shouldn't even be able to encompass, it's a vast motionless globe of burning gas, around which this little ball of a planet rolls like a pellet of dung propelled by a kephera beetle. Take your pick, he told himself as he started slowly down the hill...But be willing to die for your choice.
Tim Powers
Ansara was sprinting up the tunnel, increasing the gap, but Moore was beginning to slow as he heard the thundering boots of men coming down the staircase behind them. He stopped, spun around, and dropped onto his belly as, lit by the flickering light from the tunnel entrance, a figure rushed forward, arm extended. For just a heartbeat Moore glimpsed his assailant's face: the cartel truck's driver.
Propped up on his elbows now, Moore fired once into the figure's chest, the round booting him sideways into the panels before he fell onto his back.
From behind him came two more men, the rest of the weapons-transfer crew, their Belgian-made cop-killer pistols flashing, the shots booming through the tunnel as one 5.7x28-millimeter round struck the pipe near Moore's elbow.
Tom Clancy