The Art of Tetman Callis

“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: 1. a high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; 2. an advanced state of social atomization and the […]

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“Police files are our only claim to immortality.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“People are always shouting they want to create a better future.  It’s not true.  The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.  The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it.  The only reason people want to be masters of […]

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“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him.  Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.” […]

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“If you’re too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too.” — Teju Cole, Open City Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“There is always a bull market for vengeance and violence in America.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Different people want different things in this world, and you have to be careful about taking risks.  Hungry people have the cunning of wild beasts.  A thing that seemed strange and wrong yesterday can seem perfectly reasonable tomorrow, or vice versa.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email […]

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“Everybody you see these days might have the power to get you locked up….  Who knows why?  They will have reasons straight out of some horrible Kafka story, but in the end it won’t matter any more than a full moon behind clouds.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear (ellipsis in original) Share this… […]

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“Vicious thieves have always ruled the world.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Never believe the first thing an FBI agent tells you about anything–especially not if he seems to believe you are guilty of a crime.  Maybe he has no evidence.  Maybe he’s bluffing.  Maybe you are innocent.  Maybe.  The Law can be hazy on these things.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear Share this… Facebook […]

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“The only real difference between the Sane and the Insane, in this world, is the Sane have the power to have the Insane locked up.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Every once in a while, but not often, you can sit down and write a thing that you know is going to stand people’s hair on end for the rest of their lives—a perfect memory of some kind, like a vision, and you can see the words rolling out of your fingers and bouncing around […]

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“Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.  In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously.  Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher.  For good or […]

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“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it into the object of our game; to turn it into a toy.” — Milan Kundera, […]

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“It has been extremely lucky that up to now wars have been fought only by men.  If they had been fought by women, they would have been so consistently cruel that today there wouldn’t be a single human being left on the planet.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin […]

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“If our lives were endless, like the lives of the gods of antiquity, the concept of episode would lose its meaning, for in infinity every event, no matter how trivial, would meet up with its consequence and unfold into a story.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“No episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure.  Episodes are like land mines.  The majority of them never explode, but the […]

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“Life is as stuffed with episodes as a mattress is with horsehair, but a poet (according to Aristotle) is not an upholsterer and must remove all stuffing from his story, even though real life consists of nothing but precisely such stuffing.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“In Aristotle’s Poetics, the episode is an important concept.  Aristotle did not like episodes.  According to him, an episode, from the point of view of poetry, is the worst possible type of event.  It is neither an unavoidable consequence of preceding action nor the cause of what is to follow: it is outside the causal […]

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“Isn’t the cause of most bad paintings and bad novels simply the fact that artists consider their passion for art something holy, some sort of mission if not duty (duty to oneself, even to mankind)?” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Living, there is no happiness in that.  Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.  But being, being is happiness.  Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Road: a strip of ground over which one walks.  A highway differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point to another.  A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it […]

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“To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly.  Man doesn’t know how to be mortal.  And when he dies, he doesn’t even know how to be dead.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin […]

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“I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.  I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi, emphasis in original) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“He that, renouncing righteousness and the good, devotes himself to pleasure solely, is like a man that falling asleep on top of a tree, wakes when he has fallen down.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Kishkindhakanda Sarga 38 Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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