61 Quotes by James Purdy

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

You fucked-up hunk.

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

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.

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

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.

Almost everything official in America is a huge fraud.

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.

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.