Andrei Codrescu Quotes & Sayings

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances. — Andrei Codrescu

This is important, Your Honor, because it establishes the fact that language, like blood, is a living thing that proceeds forward in time. — Andrei Codrescu

The time has come for writers to become inaccessible again. The reason is not some kind of 'mystique' that makes people curious (though it helps), but the fact that no real writers ever lay down anything real in public-they work in solitude, they think hard, and their thoughts are rarely nice or 'friendly.' — Andrei Codrescu

Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share. — Andrei Codrescu

My mother and I were part of a deal in the mid-'60s between Romania and Israel. Israel bought freedom for Romanian Jews for $2,000 a head. Ceausescu made a bundle in hard currency. He also 'sold' ethnic Germans to West Germany. Instead of going to Israel, my mother and I came to the United States. — Andrei Codrescu

There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers. — Andrei Codrescu

It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls. — Andrei Codrescu

With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage. — Andrei Codrescu

Romanians have a particular love for poetry and have a beautiful, vivid language. The poets they love are not versifiers like Vadim Tudor, but genuinely complex mystical souls like Mircea Cartarescu. — Andrei Codrescu

Cookbooks bear the same relation to real books that microwave food bears to your grandmother?s. — Andrei Codrescu

Only the poor can create art. — Andrei Codrescu

After so many years, I feel more American than anything else, but I'm also Romanian and whatever other oddities of temperament I picked up elsewhere, in Transylvania or France, for instance. These days, everybody is both an exile and a resident - they don't call it the global village for nothing. — Andrei Codrescu

The evaporation of 4 million who believe in this crap would leave the world a better place. — Andrei Codrescu

New Orleans reminds me of Romania because New Orleans is very corrupt politically. — Andrei Codrescu

Romanians are culturally European, very close to the French. Socially, they are now building a society that is emotionally closer to the Balkans, Turkey and Greece. — Andrei Codrescu

Like Venice, Italy, this is a place of fleeting beauty. The knowledge that we won't be here long gives everyone an intense appetite for living. — Andrei Codrescu

Poetry is again hip in America as people are beginning to refuse to die of boredom and to choke in the fog of their funny money. — Andrei Codrescu

The fact is we all know that there exists in the world an order different from that in which we pass our days. If we reveal its existence people think that we are crazy. — Andrei Codrescu

How did you fall in love with New Orleans? At once, madly. Looking back, sometimes I think it was predestined. — Andrei Codrescu

Most artists don't get paid for what they do, and they are lucky if they can persuade a friend to let them show something at a kid's birthday party. — Andrei Codrescu

These are the poems of a traveler and a lover who feels both the terror of time passing and the consolation of eternity. From such tension spring lovely poetic objects, ready for intelligent use. — Andrei Codrescu

Americans are accustomed to welcoming, or at least receiving, refugees from other countries, not creating our own. — Andrei Codrescu

Real artists free of the tedium of money can use, now, all of society as an idea factory. — Andrei Codrescu

In the grand collage that is Dada, past and future are equally usable. — Andrei Codrescu

The peasants of all lands recognize power and they salute it, whether it's good or evil. — Andrei Codrescu

It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one's story, as well as one's soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear. — Andrei Codrescu

Death is not enough for such men. We must add mechanics — Andrei Codrescu

The richness of our ethnic insults vocabulary was wide and deep. It reflected, all too easily, the more elaborate predjiduces of our parents (not my parents), which in their rabid form, had already resulted in tribal bloodbaths. — Andrei Codrescu

The worst part about zombies raging unchecked is the slow paralysis that they induce in people who aren't quite zombies yet. The rest of us un-zombies turn our heads, hoping the ghouls will just go away. — Andrei Codrescu

The beauty of Molly's is that it is not, whether in the daytime or at night, the exclusive preserve of an age or income group. Unlike the sterile night scenes of pretentious San Francisco or New York, Molly's (and most other New Orleans bars) welcomes all ages, all colors, and all sexual persuasions, provided they are willing to surrender to the atmosphere. — Andrei Codrescu

There is a velvety sensuality here at the mouth of the Mississippi that you won't find anywhere else. Tell me what the air feels like at 3 A.M. on a Thursday night in August in Shaker Heights and I bet you won't be able to say because nobody stays up that late. But in New Orleans, I tell you, it's ink and honey passed through silver moonlight. — Andrei Codrescu

It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold. — Andrei Codrescu

Nosferatu is the daddy of modern American sex. — Andrei Codrescu

The real technology -behind all our other technologies- is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in. — Andrei Codrescu

Our secrets, odd or not, are the pins that keep our inner life in place: the inform our psyche with meaning. — Andrei Codrescu