“If you sincerely desire a truly well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and "nutty." You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket... even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality.”
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it.
(J.D. (Jerome David) Salinger (b. 1919), U.S. author. Catcher in the Rye, ch. 1 (1951).
Opening words.)
I'm coming home. I remember your saying when I left that people were dying and that I was crapping around with fate to come here. You were more right than you could imagine.
(Judith Rascoe, U.S. screenwriter, Robert Stone (b. 1939), and Karel Reisz. Converse (Michael Moriarty), Who'll Stop the Rain? Writing his wife from Vietnam (1978).)
What a squalid and irresponsible little profession it is.... Nothing prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until it craps on you from a great height.
(Ken Livingstone (b. 1945), British Labour politician. Quoted in City Limits (London, May 1, 1986).)
