Murnane Quotes & Sayings

Once you start your exercise routine and you include in your daily diet foods rich in calcium and potassium, you will start losing weight in about a week — Jeannette Murueta

The details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction. — Gerald Murnane

The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel. — Teju Cole

During my sixteen years as a teacher of writing, I removed many adverbs and adverbial phrases from students' writing. I decided long ago that a writer who needlessly modifies words is either a nervous writer who does not believe in the worth of what they are writing or a vain writer who wants to be seen as discriminating and sensitive to nuances or meaning. — Gerald Murnane

A lot of people are very sacred with their ideas, and there is something to protecting yourself in that way, but there's also something to idea sharing, or being the person who makes the mistake in public so people can study that. — Kanye West

I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that to read fiction was to make available for myself a new kind of space. In that space, a version of myself was free to move among places and personages the distinguishing features of which were the feelings they caused to arise in me rather than their seeming appearance, much less their possible resemblance to places or persons in the world where I sat reading. — Gerald Murnane

Matilda had never once stopped to think about where Miss Honey might be living. She had always regarded her purely as a teacher, a person who turned up out of nowhere and taught at school and then went away again. Do any of us children, she wondered, ever stop to ask ourselves where our teachers go when school is over for the day? Do we wonder if they live alone, or if there is a mother at home or a sister or a husband? — Roald Dahl

To my beloved friends, there's simply no life without you guys. Thanks for the advice and the love and the billion dinners and laughs. Without you all . . . I'd look for new friends and get them. — Martin Short

Soon after I left university, I came up with another definition of a literary critic or would be critic: someoone who uses churlish towards the end of an article or review. — Gerald Murnane

Now, what is the comparative loudness of a man's flicking the corners of a few banknotes in the middle of his room with the same man's pissing furiously from a bursting bladder into a stainless-steel sink in the corner of his room nearest to a pair of huddled, listening females? — Gerald Murnane

I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully. — Teju Cole

true fiction is more likely to include what was overlooked or ignored or barely seen or felt at the time of its occurrences but comes continually to mind ten or twenty years afterwards not on account of its having long ago provoked passion or pain but because of its appearing to be part of a pattern of meaning that extends over much of a lifetime — Gerald Murnane

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress. — William Shakespeare

RESIST no thought; RETAIN no thought; REACT to no thought; RETURN to the sacred word. — Cynthia Bourgeault

Do your married friends tell you that you're too picky? Honey, they settled. Either that or they're not really your friends. — Maria Murnane

You know you're a real grown-up when nothing but Oreos is black and white. — Maria Murnane

I read once that certain musical compositions (by Bach? by Beethoven? I forget) sounded like the efforts of the human soul to explain itself to God. If ever I find my perfect combination of brown and lilac, I'll feel as though I've thus explained myself. — Gerald Murnane