Loss Of Essence Quotes

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.

Football has gone off the rails. It's lost its spirit.

Film has lost something in the translation to high tech. It's become so super-real. It's with digital this and stereo that, and everything's like a CD.

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.

All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.

Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it.

Most of all, I am struck by an irony central to the lot of a purebred dog: As it attains the hallmarks of its breed, it seems to simultaneously relinquish its basic dogginess, until it is less a dog than a Pomeranian, Collie or Bloodhound.

The poetry, if you will, of life is reduced to this sort of dry, scientific, you know, it's the worst sort of précis of who we are.