Self-Referential Quotes

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

Fear is fear of fear, I think.

Non-fiction is a big responsibility. Rationality. Facts. The urgent need to reflect some small aspect of reality. But fiction is a private autism, a self-referential world in which the writer is omnipotent. Gravity, taxes, and death are mere options, subject to the writer's fancy.

Irony became the head that bit its tail and then there is no way out.

George Clooney likes to talk about himself in the third person mostly. He's always enjoyed it. Listen, I don't like to think in those terms, where you just have to completely separate yourself one from the other.

Listen: People are always saying, 'Rickey says Rickey.' But it's been blown way out of proportion. People might catch me, when they know I'm ticked off, saying, 'Rickey, what the heck are you doing, Rickey?' They say, 'Darn, Rickey, what are you saying Rickey for? Why don't you just say, 'I?' But I never did. I always said, 'Rickey,' and it become something for people to joke about.

Theatre has to be theatrical. It has to draw attention to itself, like poetry.

Phenomena are constantly folded back upon themselves.

When I sat down to write I just felt like a geek writing about myself. And then it dawned on me, just because of the way I am, I can't stop talking, and part of the problem is that anything that gets said reminds me of something that happened to me one time, and invariably I cut people off and talk about myself.

Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.

Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw

The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.

I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

Reason cannot break out of its own loop.

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

Everyone likes talking about himself. - Hercule Poirot

Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.

Beware of advice-even this.

In the contemporary world, artists are almost entirely self-referential.

I don't think architecture should be considered as an art form in the first instance. Whenever I say that, it makes people really angry. But this is a very political profession in the Grecian sense. I believe there have to be reasons for every building, and that the ideas should not be self-referential.

An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.

Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about me.

I am myself the matter of my book.

And to be honest, most actors are incredibly solipsistic.