Времетрясение

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

Ernest Hemingway in 1952 published <…> a long short story called The Old Man and the Sea. <…>
I asked a <…> commercial fisherman what he thought of it. He said the hero was an idiot. He should have hacked off the best chunks of meat and put them in the bottom of the boat, and left the rest of the carcass for the sharks.
It could be that the sharks Hemingway had in mind were critics who hadn't much liked his first novel in ten years, Across the River and into the Trees, published two years earlier. As far as I know, he never said so.

Kilgore Trout <…> has been my alter ego in several of my other novels.

… Andrei Sakharov won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay with a mate that cracked?

He had been a forward observer for the Army field artillery in Europe <…>.
I asked him at the clambake in 2001, at the writers' retreat Xanadu, what he'd done during the war, which he called "civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.
He said without a scintilla of regret, "I made sandwiches of German soldiers between an erupting Earth and an exploding sky, and in a blizzard of razor blades."

… worked up designs for television cameras and transmitters and receivers. <…> They were instantly popular because the shows were so attractive and no thinking was involved. <…>
Young Booboolings didn't see any point in developing imaginations anymore, since all they had to do was turn on a switch and see all kinds of jazzy shit. They would look at a printed page or a painting and wonder how anybody could have gotten his or her rocks off looking at things that simple and dead.

I wouldn't have missed the Great Depression or my part in World War Two for anything. Trout asserted at the clambake that our war would live forever in show biz, as other wars would not, because of the uniforms of the Nazis.
He commented unfavorably on the camouflage suits our own generals wear nowadays on TV, when they describe our blasting the bejesus out of some Third World country because of petroleum. "I can't imagine," he said, "any part of the world where such garish pajamas would make a soldier less rather than more visible.
"We are evidently preparing," he said, "to fight World War Three in the midst of an enormous Spanish omelet."

"The first something to be implied by all the nothing, <…> was in fact two somethings, who were God and Satan. God was male. Satan was female. They implied each other, and hence were peers in the emerging power structure, which was itself nothing but an implication. Power was implied by weakness. <…>
"All Satan wanted to do was help, and she did in many cases. <…> And her record for promoting nostrutms with occasionally dreadful side effects is no worse than that of the most reputable pharmaceutical houses of the present day."

He was a black hole to anyone…

… way-the-hell-and-gone up on West 155th Street in Manhattan…

Frank went to a computer store, and asked if he could try out Palladio before buying it. He doubted very much that it could help anyone with his native talent and education. So right there in the store, and in a period of no more than half an hour, Palladio gave him what he had asked it for, working drawings that would enable a contractor to build a three-story parking garage in the manner of Thomas Jefferson. <…>
"It used to be said of a man who had suffered a catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweezers now."
He was speaking, of course, of microchips.

In public lectures, I myself often say, "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts."

"If your brains were dynamite, there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off."

Trout characterized the sort of work he was able to get back then as "cleaning birdshit out of cuckoo clocks."

"The timequake of 2001 was a cosmic charley horse in the sinews of Destiny. <…> the Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point?
"It fibrillated with indecision. Maybe it should have a family reunion back where it all began, and then make a great big BANG again."

The <…> story was about a planet in another galaxy, where the little green people, each with only one eye in the middle of his or her forehead, could get food only if they could sell goods or services to somebody else. The planet ran out of customers, and nobody could think of anything sensible to do about that. All the little green people starved to death. <…>
The name of the shrink was the name of the story, too, which was "Dr. Schadenfreude." This doctor had his patients lie on a couch and talk, all right, but they could ramble on only about dumb or crazy things that had happened to total strangers in supermarket tabloids or on TV talk shows.
If a patient accidentally said "I" or "me" or "my" or "myself" or "mine," Dr. Schadenfreude went ape. He leapt out of his overstuffed leather chair. He stamped his feet. He flapped his arms.
He put his livid face directly over the patient. He snarled and barked things like this: "When will you ever learn that nobody cares anything about you, you, you, you boring, insignificant piece of poop? Your whole problem is you think you matter! Get over that, or sashay your stuck-up butt the hell out of here!"

"Those artsy-fartsy twerps <…> create living, breathing, three-dimensional characters with ink on paper. <…> Wonderful! As though the planet weren't already dying because it has three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters!"

That one was set in Adolf Hitler's commodious bombproof bunker underneath the ruins of Berlin, Germany, at the end of World War Two in Europe. <…>
Tanks and infantry of the Soviet Union are only a few hundred yards away from the bunker's iron door up at street level. <…>
Goebbels remembers that his kids have brought the game of Bingo with them. It was captured intact from American troops during the Battle of the Bulge some four months earlier. <…>
As though there were a God in Heaven after all, it is Der Führer who shouts "BINGO!" Adolf Hitler wins! He says incredulously, in German, of course, "I can't believe it. I've never played this game before, and yet I've won, I've won! What can this be but a miracle?" He is a Roman Catholic.
He rises from his chair at the table. His eyes are still fixed on the winning card before him, according to Trout, "as if it were a shred from the Shroud of Turin." This prick asks, "What can this mean but that things aren't as bad as we thought they were?"
Eva Braun spoils the moment by swallowing a capsule of cyanide. Goebbels's wife gave it to her for a wedding present. Frau Goebbels had more capsules than she needed for her immediate family.<…>

… Nietzsche <…> said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism.

In 1991, as now, I was gazing at a list of all I'd published, and wondering, "How the hell did I do that?"
I was feeling as I feel now, like whalers Herman Melville described, who didn't talk anymore. They had said absolutely everything they could ever say.

I say in lectures in 1996 that fifty percent or more of American marriages go bust because most of us no longer have extended families. When you marry somebody now, all you get is one person.
I say that when couples fight, it isn't about money or sex or power. What they're really saying is, "You're not enough people!"

"There is a planet in the Solar System where the people are so stupid they didn't catch on for a million years that there was another half to their planet. They didn't figure that out until five hundred years ago! Only five hundred years ago! And yet they are now calling themselves Homo sapiens.
"Dumb? You want to talk dumb? The people in one of the halves were so dumb, they didn't have an alphabet! They hadn't invented the wheel yet!"

As for his sandals: At least they were tough. They were made of the same material as the brake shoes on the Apollo 11 spacecraft <…>.
The sandals were government surplus from the Vietnam War <…>. American soldiers on patrol in that conflict wore the sandals over their lightweight jungle boots. They did that because the enemy used to stick spikes pointed upward, and dipped in shit so as to cause serious infections, in paths leading through the jungle.

Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done they're done.
<…> Most men are bashers, and most women are swoopers. <…>
Writers who are swoopers, it seems to me, find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without wondering why or how people are alive in the first place.
Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: "What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?"

I still quote Eugene Debs <…> in every speech:
"While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
In recent years, I've found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap.
Which it is not.

The hunters agreed that anybody who complained about Father's cooking became the cook. So Father prepared worse and worse meals, while the others were having one hell of a good time in the forest. No matter how awful a supper was, though, the hunters pronounced it lip-smacking delicious, clapping Father on the back and so on.
After they marched off one morning, Father found a pile of fresh moose poop outside. He fried it in motor oil. That night he served it as steaming patties.
The first guy to taste one spit it out. He couldn't help himself! He spluttered, "Jesus Christ! That tastes like moose poop fried in motor oil!"
But then he added, "But good, but good!"

Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?
There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France.
I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer's mind. If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball game.
Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness. <…>
There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real picture-lovers like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second time.

The Wrinkled Old Family Retainer is about a wedding. The bride is Mirabile Dictu, a virgin. The groom is Flagrante Delicto, a heartless womanizer.
Sotto Voce, a male guest standing at the fringe of the ceremony, says out of the corner of his mouth to a guy standing next to him, "I don't bother with all this. I simply find a woman who hates me, and I give her a house."
And the other guy says, as the groom is kissing the bride, "All women are psychotic. All men are jerks."
The eponymous wrinkled old family retainer, crying his rheumy eyes out behind a potted palm, is Scrotum.

… T. S. Eliot <…> wound up sounding like the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Tennessee Williams <…> wound up sounding like Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind.

Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.

I am so old that I can remember when the word fuck was thought to be so full of bad magic that no respectable publication would print it. <…>
A word just as full of poison, supposedly, but which could be spoken in polite company, provided the speaker's tone implied fear and loathing, was Communism, denoting an activity as commonly and innocently practiced in many primitive societies as fucking.

… Zoltan Pepper to be creamed by the hook-and-ladder <…>.
When Trout found Zoltan's flattened and elongated wheelchair, <…> he leaned it against a tree and said it was modern art. The two wheels had been squashed together so they looked like one. Trout said it was a six-foot aluminum-and-leather praying mantis, trying to ride a unicycle.
He called it The Spirit of the Twenty-first Century.

I said to the new graduates at Butler University <…> that they were being called Generation X, two clicks from the end, but that they were as much Generation A as Adam and Eve had been. <…>
Only at this very moment in 1996, as I am about to write the next sentence, have I realized how meaningless the image of a Garden of Eden must have been to my young audience, since the world was so densely populated with other secretly frightened people, and so overplanted and rigged with both natural and manmade booby traps.