Raoul Vaneigem Quotes

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.

Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them.

I love books that give you space to climb inside there. And you have to run to keep up in places, and you have to fill in a lot of blanks yourself. So it almost becomes your story.

Anybody who's read 'Pretty Deadly' knows that I tend to savor an immersive, 'You'll figure it out as you go!' style. 'Pretty Deadly' really does not hold your hand.

I want my readers to find their own way.

I used to comfort myself with the idea of a book with serrated, detachable pages, so that you could read the thing the way it came and then shuffle the pages, like a giant deck of cards, and read the book in an entirely different order. It would be a different book, wouldn't it? It would be one of infinite books.

I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.

Life, to me, doesn't feel like a straightforward story; it doesn't make sense for me to get up there and just tell a story. Life feels like what my show feels like: chaotic and strange and disconnected.

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

I would hope that people, no matter what age, would find something to identify with in my books, pick one up and experience a personal sense of discovery. That's great. But for them, not for me.

So I started out for God knows where. I guess I'll know when I get there.

I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me.

Language is a finding place, not a hiding place.

Personal experimentation is revealing, and once you get into it, immensely engaging.

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the later. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomena.

We get closer to God as we get more intimately and understandingly acquainted with the things He has created. I know of nothing more inspiring than that of making discoveries for one's self.

Each moment spent searching is also a moment spent finding.

If you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn more about it.

It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely...and half the time you'll be wondering why the hell you're in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires. But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful... It will open up your life.

Let's agree then . . . if you're about to come to a conclusion, you'll head off in another direction. You might even find your own voice.

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become the path himself.

All education is self-discovery.