Material Quotes

Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.

We get something to do and as soon as we’ve got it, it gets us.

A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.

Money is neither a material to work upon nor a tool to work with.

The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

Don’t wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.

I’m starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There’s a darkness inside of me that I’m only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it’s starting to scare me.

I may make light of being a domestic terrorist, but if they can brand me a domestic terrorist and confiscate all my materials, and then expand into confiscating other people’s materials.