James Purdy quotes:

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.

The New York Times is the worst newspaper in the world and it's extremely vicious to artists.

If you're a writer, you have to be an egomaniac. You have to just believe in yourself, which is hard work.

Margaret Meade is always running around saying that marijuana's just like bread and water! Well, bread and water are poison, and marijuana's a poison. Now, if you like poison, why shouldn't you have it? But don't try to pretend that it's innocuous.

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.

Almost everything official in America is a huge fraud.

Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the girders of an ancient bridge is the skeleton of a child which superstition says keeps the bridge standing.

New York establishment isn't really a literary establishment. It's just a collection of broken down old newspaper hacks who pass judgment on books that they have not even read, with assuredness of Jehova.

There's the world of the newspapers. They believe that what is happening is happening, which is so naïve. Because they're the first to turn on that.

I've never been in fashion. Not at all.

I think America, really, is over.

Publishers seem to be in an alcoholic haze most of the time. Well, the publishers have no idea what a writer is.

I think fame is something that you've achieved in your inner self that becomes known to others outside you. There are really very few famous people in history.

Actually, television tells you to take dope. It tells you to destroy the human race really, by first having more consumers and then consuming more poison and then making the whole planet uninhabitable.

As always, I wonder if I'll get through the winter. Then when winter is over, I wonder about the summer. But that's because the system decided which author shall be commercially successful. As I said, the most vicious of them all is The New York Times, because it pretends to be literary and impartial, and it's really this opinionated, myopic, stupid giant of incompetence.

It was paper, as he had once joked to Amos, that he was really queer for.

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

The worse the author, the more he is known.

None of my books are best-sellers. In fact, the only thing that's kept me alive is the books that are in paperback. People find them, they like them, and they pass them on.

There are no manners left in America at all, because all you're doing is kicking the person next to you so that you can consume more, see more, and get more.

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.

There's really nothing wrong with sentimentality... Nothing I wrote is sentimental.

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.

I am against all machines. It's no wonder that so many Americans go on dope when they have no other cultural stimulus than a television.

Most journalists are broken down alcoholics.

The public is totally illiterate in America. It can't read at all. It's absolutely insensitive to words.

No one looks at a television, and no one hears it. It's a poison.

Television masturbates its audience even though the audience is not really watching. It masturbates orifices the audience doesn't have. It sticks holes in the viewer and masturbates in those holes. Then it finally gets into the brain and masturbates there, too.

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