"You know, there are the enthusiasts for technology, and they always say — and this has been happening now for probably 150 years — they say that new technology is going to change the way people think and live. It’s going to revolutionize our live. Not just our physical lives, but our inner lives as well. I am not at all a believer in this view for the simple reason that we have bodies. We get sick. We die. We love. We suffer. We grieve. We get angry. These are the constants of human life whether you live in ancient Rome or contemporary America. I really don’t think that people have changed because of the telegraph or the radio or the cell phone or the airplane or, now, computer technology."

Paul Auster, interviewed by Jonathan Lethem in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (via winterlief, via booklover)

"Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction. "

Ray Bradbury (via booklover)

"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality."

J.G. Ballard (via nihilnoetia, via booklover)

"The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off."

Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, transl. Linda Asher (Perennial, 2000), 18. (via enormousair, via libraryland, via booklover)

"Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage."

Ray Bradbury (via samsaramotel)

"Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds."

Ursula K. Le Guin (via ilovereadingandwriting, via booklover)

"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

William Morris

"If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."

Muphry’s Law (via jstn)

Duty Calls — xkcd