James Wolcott Quotes

Even though I've been an avid consumer of contemporary music since my early teens, the world of rock music has always been at something of a distance - I listen to it, read about it, I talk about it, but I've had little or no contact with its denizens.

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

We are kind of one step removed, not really in the center of things.

Every writer is an outsider.

All my close friends are non-conformist. To say 'misfits' sounds bad, but there is something positive about being a little on the outside - it gives you an interesting perspective on things - and I think that's something Robyn and I share.

It's always easy to judge from afar

As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

Writers are first and foremost observers. We lose ourselves in the watching and then the telling of the world we find. Often we feel on the fringes, in the margins of life. And that's where we belong. What you are a part of, you cannot observe.

Conor was no longer invisible. They all saw him now. But he was further away than ever.

What I mean by living to one's self is living in the world, as in it, not of it.

My natural state is an outsider. I've always felt outside the group, and I've always been analyzing the group.

Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.

The more independent you are of him, the more interested he will be.

Once there is a distance between you and your thought process, a new freedom is born. With this freedom, a new perception arises.

My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in.

When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was fit in, but if you're perpetually an outsider, it gives you a perspective that might have a little more objectivity than people who really feel connected to their social environment in which they grow up.

Thus I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species.

The special trait making me an anarch is that I live in a world which I ‘ultimately’ do not take seriously. This increases my freedom; I serve as a temporary volunteer

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

When you step away from it all, you lose perspective.

I've had to realize I need to distance myself a bit from relying on the feedback. I think it's wonderful but can also be poison. You don't want to buy into it too much.

But from a distance. I would have left you whole and wholly for the delectation of those who wanted more and cared less.

Attachment is the root cause of all misery - and our mind is such that it starts clinging to each and everything. It starts becoming identified, attached, it does not know how to keep a distance; hence the misery.

I would like to perfect the art of being studiously aloof

Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things.