The Cut Ups Quotes & Sayings

I still use a lot of cut-ups, I physically cut-up pieces of paper and stick them all together on another piece of paper then I'll think, "Ah, that looks good," or shuffle them around a bit and then I'll photocopy it and then that's my lyrics. — Thighpaulsandra

My demeanor isn't that of a woman enraged. To see me slumped, glassy-eyed, holding a sandwich someone has cut for me into four "manageable" pieces, a person might tell you I look much more like a woman subdued. — Koren Zailckas

Going out at night the medics gave you pills, Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar. [ ... ] I knew one 4th division Lurp who took his pills by the fistful, downs from the left pocket of his tiger suit and ups from the right, one to cut the trail for him and the other to send him down it. He told me that they cooled things out just right for him, that could see that old jungle at night like he was looking at it through a starlight scope. "They sure give you the range," he said. — Michael Herr

Idols of the injury,
dug in behind the least understood
motor plan information.
The vile abomination temporal lobes and
The four loathsome memory walls and
The four reasoning, arithmetic beasts
are found for all behind pain and planes.
Portrayed as a house,
Go in, function, cause blindness from
The house's hearing spirit, judgment and
The court's four bronze woes and
The functioning brain lobe wings,
Go in, hearing and perception,
I dig under door fronts, pain and plans. — Bill Ectric

Dreamt all night of horticulture prospects of
in northland futures for horticulturalists versed
in cut-ups developing new strains new fruits
as for example "tremeloes — Wystan Curnow

The actors I respect are the real character actors, who are the real chameleon actors that completely change from role to role. I love Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman. They tend to be British, I guess. People who really disappear and transform, I really like that. — Fran Kranz

Ty removed his fingers from Zane's back as he saw the shiver run through him, and he pressed his lips tightly together, looking up and away in disgust as he resigned himself to what he was about to do. Broaching the subject could possibly cost him his job if Zane went tattling to the higher-ups about sexual harassment or some shit, but Ty was going to do it anyway. "Anything you need to say to me?"
...
The visual of Ty's nude body flashed behind Zane's eyelids, and he spoke before he thought better of it. "Nothing you want to hear," he murmured as he faced the mirror, hoping to diffuse the situation. "Thanks for the help," he added, wanting desperately to get away from this tension.
...
"You sure about that?" Ty asked as his stomach fluttered nervously. His voice finally betrayed the nerves. "Trying to be a real partner to you here, Zane. If you need to tell me something, then here's your chance. — Abigail Roux

In Technologized Desire, the cultural pathologies that mark the panic ecstasy and terminal doom of the posthuman condition are powerfully rehearsed in the language of science fiction. Here, images of prosthetic subjects, zombies, cut-ups and armies of the medieval dead actually slip off the pages of literature to become the terminal hauntology of these technologized times. Technologized Desire is nothing less than a brilliant data screen of future memories. Read it well: it's a survival guide for bodies flatlined by the speed of accelerating technology. — Arthur Kroker

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? — William S. Burroughs

Know who I am? ... 'Good Bye Mister' is my name ... 'Wind and Dust' is my name ... 'Never Happened' is my name ... — William S. Burroughs

So it is written - but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write it over again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again. — Catherynne M Valente

Few people realize that luck is created. — Robert Kiyosaki

I remember one Fourth of July evening in Philadelphia, about a year after my surgery. I was walking home arm in arm with Lisa, my lover at the time, after the fireworks display. We were leaning in to one another, walking like lovers walk. Coming towards us was a family of five: mom, dad, and three teenage boys. "Look it's a coupla faggots," said one of the boys. "Nah, it's two girls," said another. "That's enough outa you," bellowed the father, "one of 'em's got to be a man. This is America! — Kate Bornstein

I have to go to the woods, and I have to meet the wolf, or else my life will never begin. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Apparently, Stephen Hunter does a fantastic barbecue lamb. — Peter Hambleton

It's pretty easy in theatre. The comedy's either physical or verbal, and you're looking at the whole frame at once. But TV executives want close-ups. I keep telling them to look at Preston Sturges' movies. He'll do a whole scene without a cut in it, and it's a riot. — Don Scardino

The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction. — Brion Gysin

I have no message to give the politicians of the world. They're all completely addicted to promiscuous verbalization and I'm quite sure they would not be at all interested in hearing about cut-ups and hieroglyphics and still less interested to hear about silence. — William S. Burroughs

You'll find that marriage is a good short cut to the truth. No, not quite that. A way of doubling back to the truth. Another thing you'll find is that the years of illusion aren't those of adolescence, as the grown-ups try to tell us; they're the ones immediately after it, say the middle twenties, the false maturity if you like, when you first get thoroughly embroiled in things and lose your head. Your age, by the way, Jim. That's when you first realize that sex is important to other people besides yourself. A discovery like that can't help knocking you off balance for a time. — Kingsley Amis