Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
the speculative novelist becomes a satirist; he looks around, and he makes it worse.
Martin Amis • The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)
Now Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog Kazak existed as wave phenomena—apparently
Kurt Vonnegut • The Sirens of Titan
Salman Rushdie • Salman Rushdie · Imaginary Homelands
This is the beauty of the wonder tale and its descendant, fiction: that one can simultaneously know that the story is a work of imagination, which is to say untrue, and believe it to contain profound truth. The boundary between the magical and the real, at such moments, ceases to exist.
Salman Rushdie • Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020
“I'm looking back at that happy man, myself, as he stands there-soaked in summer moonlight on that Thursday night in August.
He's happy because the scene is beautiful; and because he's in love; and because his novel is finished—he only just did the very last thing, correcting the galleys-and its first readers are excited by it. His life feels good.
... See more“…the stammerings of an old man who does not seem to have achieved a full psychic victory over an awkward adolescence…”
Eugene Thacker • Infinite Resignation
possibly the most extreme example in modern fiction of how beautifully and lovingly someone can write 70,000 words of vicious nonsense.