Iain Sinclair Quotes & Sayings

One thing I had learnt, the last person you should ask for a solution is the author. If he knew where he was going, he'd stop dead in his tracks. — Iain Sinclair

For a poet the world is always static in the sense that you're a mass observer and you can't afford to care whether people are busy or not. You're a witness. — Iain Sinclair

I mean that certain fictions, chiefly Conan Doyle, Stevenson, but many others also, laid out a template that was more powerful than any local documentary account - the presences that they created, or "figures" if you prefer it, like Rabbi Loew's Golem, became too much and too fast to be contained within the conventional limits of that fiction. They got out into the stream of time, the ether; they escaped into the labyrinth. They achieved an independent existence.
The writers were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present. They got in on the curve of time, so that by writing, by holding off the inhibiting reflex of the rational mind, they were able to propose a text that was prophetic. — Iain Sinclair

The only times I'm not relaxed are when I haven't got a project on the go. — Iain Sinclair

Why not add another yarn? That's all we are in the end, any of us, a couple of dozen unreliable stories. — Iain Sinclair

Mossy had trouble breathing. He was not convinced the rewards repaid the effort. He took breath in, but after that let it fend for itself. — Iain Sinclair

All kinds of weird stuff going down, whisperings in corners, significant matches struck and blown out. The whores, unoccupied, were drinking heavily. The police, occupied were drinking even more heavily. The grass in the corner wanted to drink most heavily, but lacked the poke. — Iain Sinclair

If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them. — Iain Sinclair

You can't impose a legacy. — Iain Sinclair

The poet he was escorting into Wales was a Horus-headed dud of some personal magnetism. The hair was feathered gell, the nose hooked. He stared at me and he didn't. His eyes belonged to a magician; one bored into you, right through the lens into the depths of the vitreous humor - while the other popped and wobbled in the style of Ben Turpin. He folded in on himself, profile sharp as an axe. A labrys. This man would have no problem seeing around a corner. — Iain Sinclair

Light is all memory. — Iain Sinclair

Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret's Thatcher's Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of 'Fitzcarraldo', a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts:Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth,post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral. — Iain Sinclair

Siebel, The Magazine has a man in a suit on the cover. He's not smiling, or frowning. He wears a beard that isn't a beard; it's a quotation from a film nobody can put their finger on. 'Customer satisfaction,' says the brochure. 'Seamless integration.' 'Comprehensive upgrade.' Of what? I want to scream. 'Solutions provider.' Siebel has solutions for questions that have not yet been asked, will never be asked.
A Sino-American businessman holds a tiny screen in his hand: 'You're always connected and always available. Some call it a revolution; others call it evolution.' Language is de-fanged, homogenised. Yellow E-tab faces leer at you. Ecstasy without frenzy. Satisfaction, whether you want it or not. — Iain Sinclair

Getting comprehensively lost in a car with a full tank of petrol at someone else's expense, you can't beat it. — Iain Sinclair

Atkins knows two kinds of birds: seagulls and the ones that aren't seagulls. — Iain Sinclair

You can't leave the thing that you are, the house that has become your biography. — Iain Sinclair

...drunk enough on earth's liquors to relish the prospect of the knife. — Iain Sinclair

Men of the cloth live in this monologue, it is their due: nobody talks back to a pulpit. — Iain Sinclair

An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys. — Iain Sinclair

I don't feel proprietary, but I do feel there is a human identity to the borough of Hackney that's quite peculiar. It was always bloody-minded and difficult; it always stood up to central government. — Iain Sinclair

For the bookish, London is a book. For criminals, a map of opportunities. For unpapered immigrants, it is a nest of skinned eyes; sanctioned gunmen ready to blow your head off as you run for a train. When the city of distorting mirrors revealed itself, through its districts and discriminations, I discovered more about London's past as a reworking of my own submerged history. — Iain Sinclair

The faster we walk, the more ground we lose. — Iain Sinclair

To try to fix the future is a manifest absurdity. — Iain Sinclair

Hackney at certain epochs has given itself suburban airs and graces, before being slapped down and consigned once more to the dump bin of aborted ambition. — Iain Sinclair

The negotiation of city space has been made more difficult with the idea that redevelopment is an improvement for some vague future - but it's never like that, is it? Once you get there, for economic reasons you have to generate the next project - so you're immediately starting to dig up something else, and so it goes on. — Iain Sinclair

You can be so much in a room that the world outside turns to water. You've got the heater blowing out burnt air, but you still don't get warm. Your ankles are singed, but your head's in a bucket of ice. Time drips like a stalactite. The water for the coffee boils away in a tree of steam. — Iain Sinclair

You'd better make it your business to understand the market. The ability to charm or play the game is useful. — Iain Sinclair

The kind of world I'm endlessly going on about is pretty well doomed, but nevertheless I think there are recesses of it worth celebrating. — Iain Sinclair

The suicide hour of cold coffee and alien voices on the radio. — Iain Sinclair

London is a city that sleeps too much. This is the mould of its quality. A magnetic contract: to reinvent itself on the other side of dream, each day. And such dreams, smouldering against the tidal spine of the river, telling and retelling the tales that must be told to manifest a city's bones. Whispering the night architecture back into stone. — Iain Sinclair

As you become known, the demands on you are such that you get less and less time to do the things you want to do. But if there are no demands, then that means nobody wants to read what you're doing anyway, so you're stuck. — Iain Sinclair

There is an obvious connection, on the declining Roman empire's bread and circuses model, between political enthusiasm for public spectacles and the periods when we are least able to pay for them. — Iain Sinclair

That made sense of gabby meetings: salient points isolated from the gush of acoustic froth. This paper belonged on a clipboard, not being defaced by dud literature.
--Iain Sinclair — Iain Sinclair

The line of traffic advancing towards the rising sun looked like a procession of the returning dead. Every one of them, solitaries in clean shirts, smoking, checking mirrors to see if their reflections were still there, wore dark glasses. — Iain Sinclair

The world changes, but I want that change to be necessary or respectful of what has happened before. Everything changes, and that's quite right. — Iain Sinclair

What I write, I write. I'll always do it in some form. — Iain Sinclair

I looked at this first sheet, words scribbled confidently on a lined pad. My attempt at making contact the spirit of Llandor. Disaster. I couldn't do the language or locate the period. The pad of paper, with its grey-mauve rules, was all wrong. It was intended for meaningful work, figures, calculations, notes. — Iain Sinclair

With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination? — Iain Sinclair

I was gazing back in the direction of Wales, watching the Prudence clone, when I noticed a couple of drunks lurching in my direction. Night people who live in service stations. The insufficiently deceased. — Iain Sinclair

It's just a freak of fate that I'm paid to write, not paying to print my own books - but I'd be doing it anyway: it's my life. — Iain Sinclair

Life and career are the same thing. Every life has to have a plot and a plan. You have to recognize this early and be quite cold-blooded in the discovery and articulation of that plot. — Iain Sinclair

I am crumbling in sync with old Hackney. — Iain Sinclair

If the landscape changes, then I don't know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self. — Iain Sinclair