42 Quotes by Tom McCarthy

Everything becomes buffering, and buffering becomes everything.

It’s very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that’s something that resonates for me.

It’s about the possibility, or otherwise, of meaning in the world. And the possibility, or otherwise, of writing. And the possibility, or otherwise, of the resolution of everything into some coherent, cogent vision.

[...]to be real--to become fluent, natural, to cut out the detour that sweeps us around what's fundamental to events, preventing us from touching their core: the detour that makes us all second-hand and second-rate.

The first move of any strategy of cultural production, he’d say, must be to liberate things – objects, situations, systems – into uselessness.

People need foundation myths.

Incomprehensible is no better than banal – it’s just its flip-side.

But now there are no natives – or we’re the natives.

To the anthropologist, there’s no such thing as a singular episode, a singular phenomenon – only a set of variations on generic ones; the more generic, therefore, the more pure, the closer to an unvariegated or unscrambled archetype.