44 Quotes by Andrei Codrescu

He also stayed awake all night many times in the neon-lit insomnia of cities where the all-nighter is culturally certified and commercially mandated. But the all-nighter of the bohemian heroes was something else: it was spiritual work, the night shift; they stayed awake so the demons that haunt the world wouldn’t get them in their sleep.

I want a house that’s mobile but stationary, situated in a safe place without borders, where the people are peace-loving.

Money undergoes a conversion when one has more of it than is strictly necessary. When there is enough of it to move beyond the strict survival mode, money goes in search of beauty. That is to say, in search of the abstract and the imaginary. Just like poetry, which is the distillation of an excess of language. Too much money and too many words tend toward the poetic.

Matter of fact, the only certainty driving the economy is the certainty that boredom at faster and faster rates is inevitable.

There are certain cities and certain areas of certain cities where the official language is dreams. Venice is one. And Paris. North Beach in San Francisco. Wenceslaus Square in Prague. And New Orleans, the city that dreams stories. Writers come and eavesdrop and take some of those stories with them, but these are just a few drops from a Mississippi river of stories.

With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.

He’s got a bad case of something I call ethnic PMS. I think it sounds nicer than ‘bloodlust.

The “normal” family is, after all, the source of what the Devil enjoys most: anxiety, mental illness, violence, evil thoughts, fear, and social unrest. What the devil hates are attempts to escape the quotidian horror of ordinariness. These escapes into art, into otherness, must give him headaches because they might, just might, lead to innocence.

Sorry,” Wakefield insists, “but what exactly is cultural imperialism?” The boy turns his good eye to Wakefield. “That when Indian kids play with Mickey Mouse instead of kachinas. Kachinas mean something to their people. The Mouse means nothing.” “He must mean something,” Wakefield says. “Yeah, he means money. A Kachina tells the story of the earth, of the people, of dances, rituals, how to make rain… Talk to the fucking mouse and see what he tells you.