Carlisle Floyd Quotes

All Jesus' pictures are falsifications; they cannot be about the real Jesus. This real man must have been totally different, because we know he enjoyed drinking - it is impossible to think of a person who enjoys drinking and not laughing. He enjoyed women - it is difficult to think of a man who enjoys women and not laughing. He was friendly, almost in love, with a prostitute, Mary Magdalene. It is difficult to move with a prostitute - he was not moving with a Catholic monk, not with a priest, not with the Pope... with a prostitute! These were the condemnations against him.

Americans have an interesting conundrum, a black and white line: You're on one side or the other of Puritanism or licentiousness. But that gray area where people abide, between their ears or on the Internet, needs to be fleshed out more in terms of permission granted.

I feel like people associate us with the tropical Hawaiian print because, for a long time, we were wearing a lot of bright colors to exert our personality.

There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.

I don't see no black and white couples in England or America walking around proud holding their children and going out.

The Bible was written between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago, and it's filled with the knowledge that people had in that period of time, some of which you and I rejected long ago. The Bible says that women are property, that homosexuals ought to be put to death, that anybody who worships a false God ought to be executed, that a child that talks back to his parents ought to be stoned at the gates of the city. Those ideas are absurd.

A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; yet, a man who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.

If we could believe that Jesus...countenanced the follies, falsehoods and charlatanisms which his biographers father on him, ...the conclusion would be irresistible...that he was an imposter.

If you want to know what a given society believes in, look at what its largest buildings are devoted to.

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.

Women have babies and men provide the support. If you don't like the way we're made you've got to take it up with God.

Whether every story that's there [in the Bible] is a historic truth ... Again, I'm not concerned.

I think American men are more conscious of putting up a good impression. There's more of an earthiness to Englishmen. But Americans aren't afraid to come up and say, "Hi, I'd like to go out with you." Englishmen are far more sheepish about it.

Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.

There's always this kind of odd idea that people would say, "Oh, do you know the Queen?" But really people are much smarter than that.

If I was a woman in Russia, I would be a lesbian, as the men are very ugly. There are a few handsome ones, like Naomi Campbell's boyfriend, but there you see the most beautiful women and the most horrible men.

Salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men.

History, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles.

If God had meant us to have group sex, I guess he'd have given us all more organs.

The normal and the stigmatized are not persons, but perspectives.

Europeans have a different take [on nudity] than American actors do. They're not quite as hung up.

I like a bit of color myself, I must say. At my time of life, if you wear nothing but black, people might think you were too mean to change frocks between funerals.

The goat, for us, is an image that's stuck in our heads since we were kids, coming from Iowa people are like 'Beware the horned goat of satan!' and all that. It's bullshit. It's just an animal.

In contemporary American culture, the religions are more and more treated as just passing beliefs - almost as fads - rather than as the fundaments upon which the devout build their lives.

Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty anti-social when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Gameboy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that American Pastoral isn't.