39 Quotes by Thomas M. Disch

"The gods, after all, are only human, and once their rage has been placated they are perfectly capable of acts of mercy and grace."

"The distances between the stars seem brief by contrast to the distances between each of us and his fellows."

"A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development."

"It considered trying to explain their error to them, but what would be the use? They would only go away with hurt feelings. You can’t always expect people, or squirrels, to be rational."

"For a lot of people, poetry tends to be dull. It’s not read much. It takes a special kind of training and a lot of practice to read poetry with pleasure. It’s like learning to like asparagus."

"Knowledge is devalued when it becomes too generally known."

"All children... feel a demonic sympathy with those things that cause disorder in the grown-up world."

"But there you put your finger on what it is that separates the sheep from the goats, and vice versa: imagination. Those who possess it have an afterlife; those who don’t possess it, or in whom it has greatly atrophied, are reborn as plants or animals. It’s as simple, and unfair, as that. You could almost say that heaven is no more than a fantasm generated by the excess energies of the pooled imaginations of the blessed."

"Writers tend to consider distinction and originality as virtues, but they are anathema to publishers."