Date: September, 1956

Je veux saisir les choses avec l'esprit comme le pénis est saisi par le vagin. [I want to grasp things with the mind the way the penis is grasped by the vagina.]

— Duchamp, Marcel (1887-1968)

Date: July, 1962; November 22, 1962; 1973

"Memory is, really, in itself, a tool, one of the many tools that an artist uses; and some recollections, perhaps intellectual rather than emotional, are very brittle and sometimes apt to lose the flavor of reality when they are immersed by the novelist in his book, when they are given away to ch...

— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)

Date: July, 1962; November 22, 1962; 1973

"Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade--demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out."

— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)

Date: 1984

"It is never entirely true that you don’t give a shit what others say about you, but you must throw it out of your mind."

— Baldwin, James (1924-1987)

Date: 1984

"That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one's conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones."

— Ballard, J. G. (1930-2009)

Date: 1984

"I suppose people--certainly imaginative writers--who consciously exploit their own obsessions do so in part because those obsessions lie like stepping-stones in front of them, and their feet are drawn towards them."

— Ballard, J. G. (1930-2009)

Date: 1984

"At any given time, I'm aware that my mind and imagination are setting towards a particular compass point, that the whole edifice is preparing itself to lean in one way, like a great ramshackle barn."

— Ballard, J. G. (1930-2009)

Date: 1984

"Yes, if I'm not working, I talk over ideas to myself on the machine, by which I mean I type out little ideas, let my mind wander."

— Ballard, J. G. (1930-2009)

Date: 1984

"Imagination is the shortest route between any two conceivable points, and more than equal to any physical rearrangement of the brain's functions."

— Ballard, J. G. (1930-2009)

Date: 2010

"You've put it in the book and in reading it my brain is having a response like 'things as they are are really part of the world and I forgot.' How nice to just feel them roll over the brain! It's like a brain massage!"

— Gallagher, Kirsten