James Purdy Quotes & Sayings

You fucked-up hunk. — James Purdy

Not all princes he had read about in books of legends are beautiful and noble and carry their heads high. — James Purdy

And yet Curt's a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that's all. — James Purdy

She sat down about two yards away from him, near a large wandering jew. "I first heard about it at the faculty wives' tea." "Everything is discussed there. I'm aware of that." "Of course I would be the last to know. Wives always are." "Come, come, Clara, my patience and my time are running out." Without warning he lifted up one of her hand-painted china cake plates and threw it against the wall. The outrage snapped the tension in the room, and she could weep now with some mild comfort, but without, he could see, any shock or concern for the priceless plate. (Aunt Clayburn) "You admit then you have a lover," she said, examining the broken pieces of china, from her chair. "I don't admit any such god damned thing," he scoffed. "The ladies were certainly sold on the truth of it." "I wish I had the nerve to have a lover. I might have been a better writer. — James Purdy

My idea of heaven is to be hunting with you in some beautiful park with mountains like here at home but where we won't need guns or prey but we will just walk together arm in arm in this good world and be by ourselves always together forever and a day. — James Purdy

I don't have any home. Everyone I grew up with, my family, are all dead. So I feel kind of like a ghost. I'm more interested in the past. — James Purdy

Don't shoot me, Sidney, I love you.
He had shot him right through the words that still haunted him today, the most perfect words ever said to him. — James Purdy

Great books, if long enough and full of topical description and contemporary comment, were now coming into even wider public favor. The lengthier and fuller of comment, the better. — James Purdy

Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the girders of an ancient bridge is the skeleton of a child which superstition says keeps the bridge standing. — James Purdy

Margaret Meade is always running around saying that marijuana's just like bread and water! Well, bread and water are poison, and marijuana's a poison. Now, if you like poison, why shouldn't you have it? But don't try to pretend that it's innocuous. — James Purdy

If you're a writer, you have to be an egomaniac. You have to just believe in yourself, which is hard work. — James Purdy

Television masturbates its audience even though the audience is not really watching. It masturbates orifices the audience doesn't have. It sticks holes in the viewer and masturbates in those holes. Then it finally gets into the brain and masturbates there, too. — James Purdy

I wish people would call poisons poison. I don't mind people smoking marijuana, but they should admit it's a poison, and coffee's a poison, but the Americans lie so. — James Purdy

Why, if Daniel Haws was to take out his naked cock and shake it in your face, you'd die of apoplexy. — James Purdy

Almost everything official in America is a huge fraud. — James Purdy

Amos, talk about pearls for teeth ... you got 'em. No wonder the boys go for you, because I could too and if I had something to push between those pearly teeth I'd be first in line. — James Purdy

I don't think I'd like it if people liked me, I'd think that something had gone wrong. — James Purdy

New York establishment isn't really a literary establishment. It's just a collection of broken down old newspaper hacks who pass judgment on books that they have not even read, with assuredness of Jehova. — James Purdy

None of my books are best-sellers. In fact, the only thing that's kept me alive is the books that are in paperback. People find them, they like them, and they pass them on. — James Purdy

He stood there, his eyes like they had been before. Their beauty stabbed at her heart like a great knife; the hair looked so like she had just pressed the wet comb to it and perhaps put a little pomade on the sides; and the small face was clean and sad. Yet her arms somehow did not ache to hold him like her heart told her they should. Something too far away and too strong was between her and him; she only saw him as she had always seen resurrection pictures, hidden from us as in a wonderful mist that will not let us see our love complete. — James Purdy

Don't you believe in death?" I yelled at him. "No," he answers, "and I don't believe in time either ... — James Purdy

No one looks at a television, and no one hears it. It's a poison. — James Purdy

Most journalists are broken down alcoholics. — James Purdy

Most people have their buttons, Eustace continued. — James Purdy

The public is totally illiterate in America. It can't read at all. It's absolutely insensitive to words. — James Purdy

For imagine having somebody beside you day and night loving you and forgiving you and petting you forever and ever, that must be a better description of hell than being put into a boiling lake or cauldron of ice that burnt your black. — James Purdy

Ace sat down and inflated his cheeks like the wind gods in Italian paintings. — James Purdy

I think fame is something that you've achieved in your inner self that becomes known to others outside you. There are really very few famous people in history. — James Purdy

She was a church open only for him, with services in full operation twenty-four hours a day. — James Purdy

I think America, really, is over. — James Purdy

Publishers seem to be in an alcoholic haze most of the time. Well, the publishers have no idea what a writer is. — James Purdy

The world is telling you through The New York Times and The New York Review of Books "You must shut up. You must never appear again. Because you are not relevant to us." So you have to fight their attempt to destroy you, fight to continue feeling. — James Purdy

The New York Times is the worst newspaper in the world and it's extremely vicious to artists. — James Purdy

Never deprecate another person's sufferings even when imaginary. — James Purdy

Feeling is taboo, especially in New York. I read in some little magazine the other day that The New Yorker and The New York Times were sclerotic, meaning, "completely turned to rock." The critics here are that way. — James Purdy

Curt, my husband, is a writer, and he'll never write again. That's our funeral, as they say down south. Now in your case, my pet, you're married to a phenomenon of our own special epoch, a man who couldn't in a thousand years be a writer in the only meaning of the term, but who can and probably will write a book. — James Purdy

There's really nothing wrong with sentimentality ... Nothing I wrote is sentimental. — James Purdy

I don't think of people as queer or straight," the Doc said. "Not when you're as old as I. And I don't think God does either."
"I didn't know you believed in God, Doc," Vance said. — James Purdy

Writing is like a battle. You're often so into it you don't have any high ideals. You're just doing it. I have all these boxing prints on my walls. I always feel that's what I am, a boxer. I get my brains knocked out every so often. — James Purdy

He's America in action - opposed to quality. — James Purdy

Maureen had been born with the face of a gargoyle on the body of a sylph. — James Purdy

One morning while drinking coffee with Amos, Daniel Haws looked up suddenly, as if feeling the boy's eyes on him, and said:
"Tryin' to burn holes starin' like that?"
"Guess I was just resting my eyes on you so as not to look at your wallpaper," Amos gave a sour apology.
Daniel closed the book he was reading, a volume of Rhodes's history of the United States, and took a careful look at the kitchen wallpaper.
"Yes," he admitted, "that wallpaper is goddam ancient. — James Purdy

There was the cruel kind of Eustace silence. — James Purdy

Mexican marijuana, which he called the schoolboy's consolation. — James Purdy

The last human of importance the American people have been able to keep in the working end of their brain is your own Chicago triggerman, Dillinger. After him they kind of lost hold on keeping who's who straight. So don't be surprised if they don't remember who Cabot Wright is, or if they do. — James Purdy

Nobody can cause another man evil unless the second party involved allows him to. — James Purdy

But failure has kept Curt at home like a nice warm dachshund. — James Purdy

All you need do, Bernie,"she gulped her toast soaked in coffee, "is present the truth as fiction. — James Purdy

I have wrote my name in hell, Brian McFee had said as he was dying on the sawdust of the floor in the Bent Ridge Tavern. — James Purdy

New York has collapsed. — James Purdy

Just like children, he and the greatwoman Grainger longed, and especially demanded even, that something should happen, or again Parkhearst would cry, "A reward, I must have a reward. A reward for life just as I have lived it. — James Purdy

Carla had the American woman's fixed idea that love can cure, love can heal, love can bind a flowing wound. — James Purdy

There are no manners left in America at all, because all you're doing is kicking the person next to you so that you can consume more, see more, and get more. — James Purdy

In a competitive society, the thing people fear the most is love. — James Purdy

The New York Times Review of Books is toilet paper. Used. — James Purdy

The to-dos were sordid rather than exciting, perhaps because nearly everybody was approaching middle age. — James Purdy

As always, I wonder if I'll get through the winter. Then when winter is over, I wonder about the summer. But that's because the system decided which author shall be commercially successful. As I said, the most vicious of them all is The New York Times, because it pretends to be literary and impartial, and it's really this opinionated, myopic, stupid giant of incompetence. — James Purdy

If the book's bad enough, they'll publish it, and if it's bad bad enough, the daily reviewers will love it, and it'll sell. — James Purdy

The worse the author, the more he is known. — James Purdy

Then giving another taste to his drink, leaving it more than half full, he would make a rather stately progress to the booth, partly closing the door. He would take down the receiver and hesitantly begin speaking into the mouthpiece. Actually Mr. Sendel was talking only to himself. He would talk for several minutes into the silent phone, explaining how worried he was and how despairing it was at his time of life when all or almost all those dear to one have departed. — James Purdy

She made no point of concealing the truth, for the truth was all she could bear now. — James Purdy

I don't think it's like eastern mysticism, which leaves the person whole. It's really another form of cancer, television. — James Purdy

It was paper, as he had once joked to Amos, that he was really queer for. — James Purdy

Some people confess in the flesh, others on paper. — James Purdy

I am against all machines. It's no wonder that so many Americans go on dope when they have no other cultural stimulus than a television. — James Purdy

Most books don't even come into the world with the noise of the still-born. — James Purdy

One fine day you've got to give your body to somebody, or turn into a fully-fledged zombie. — James Purdy

I can describe my books as I seem them as American, imaginative, symbolic. My literary ancestors are two other Calvinists, Hawthorne, and Melville. — James Purdy

If you get lonesome enough, Carrie knew, you'll even call the police. — James Purdy

Why should you expect everything to work out successful? You're old enough to know better. — James Purdy

I've never been in fashion. Not at all. — James Purdy

Actually, television tells you to take dope. It tells you to destroy the human race really, by first having more consumers and then consuming more poison and then making the whole planet uninhabitable. — James Purdy