Graham Joyce Quotes & Sayings

“The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.”

“It is, of course, the first recourse of every elitist to see social barbarism in others.”

“The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.”

“Perhaps writers should never be allowed to get together in a workplace context. It's not like studying computer science, after all. The emotions are at large, and are shared and are questioned. There is a vulnerability.”

“Since I've been hired to contribute to the storyline of 'Doom 4' I can say what was always true anyway. I'm working. You see, for a writer, lots of stuff that doesn't look like working is actually working. Looking out of the window, for example. Balancing a pencil on the edge of the desk in order to find its exact fulcrum. Playing 'Doom.'”

“Recasting fairy tales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of 'fairy' is imported as a delicate spice.”

“George Orwell's '1984' frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: it's not a celebration of poetic language. It's decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what '1984' shows is that language can be a dirty trick.”

“Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight of reference.”

“Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny - or not so tiny - leap of the imagination is made.”

“I'd defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don't take to it, don't react by making out that they are thick.”