Mary Gaitskill: Bad Behaviour

“Here,” he said. “I’m going to buy two hours, so we can just relax and unwind. You just lie down and get snuggled up in the sheet.” He got up and turned off the light. He found a romantic jazz station on the radio. He undressed and got under the sheet with her, wrapping them both in a ball. He held her neck and felt her forehead against his shoulder. Her limbs were nestled and docile, as if all her stiff, pony-trot energy had vanished. The dim light of the gurgling fish tank cast an orangy glow over the room. “This is so nice and glamorous,” he said.

Kevin Bazzana: Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould

If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing...

My moods are inversely related to the clarity of the sky...

I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.

I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

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Peter Handke: The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

He asked to have the change - in which there was not even one bill – put in an envelope and shoved the coins back under the partition. The official, in the same way he had lined up the piles earlier, stuffed the coins into an envelope and pushed the envelope back to Bloch.Bloch thought that if everybody asked to have their money put into envelopes, the savings bank would eventually go broke. They could do the same thing with everything they bought: maybe the heavy demand for packaging would slowly but surely drive businesses bankrupt? Anyway, it was fun to think about...

His ears were so sensitive that at times the cards didn’t fall but were slammed on the next table; and at the bar the sponge didn’t fall but slapped into the sink; and the landlady’s daughter, with clogs on her bare feet, didn’t walk through the barroom but clattered through the barroom; the wine didn’t flow but gurgled into the glasses; and the music didn’t play but boomed from the jukebox.

Maria Dermoût: The Ten Thousand Things

Felicia had never seen such beads before, neither of glass nor of metal, not of jade either, she thought; of stone or baked clay, rather, opaque, in mysteriously tender and quenched colors: orange ocher, golden brown, some touched with black; so subdued of hue - melancholy almost, as if there was something of autumn in that little box woven from leaves, something of passing and dying.