"Publishing is senseless, an intellectual crime, a capital offence against the intellect. We publish only to satisfy our craving for fame; there’s no other motive except the even baser one of making money, which in my case, thank God, is ruled out by the circumstances of my birth."

- Thomas Bernhard

 “Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them.”

-David Bowie

"Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius" - Brian Eno

 Clothes Do But Cheat and Cozen Us

Away with silks, away with lawn,
I’ll have no scenes, or curtains drawn:
Give me my mistress, as she is,
Dressed in her nak’d simplicities:
For as my heart, e’er so mine eye
Is won with flesh, not drapery.

Robert Herrick

(via Stand Up and Spit)

 

descriptions of drugging 'n' dancing from Geoff Dyer's wonderful novel Paris Trance 

 'If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present . . .'

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions.

"We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’ – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books”

 – C.S. Lewis,  introduction to Saint Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.

“There’s no such thing as good and bad music. I’d really like to destroy people’s idea of good and bad music so that eventually people will hear a record and won’t even know if they like it or not. That’s my ambition" - Jerry Dammers, circa 1980.