James Purdy

In a competitive society, the thing people fear the most is love.

— James Purdy

“Pleasure died forty years ago in America, perhaps further back, in a wave of carbon monoxide, gasoline, cigarettes for dames, the belief…

— James Purdy

No one looks at a television, and no one hears it. It's a poison.

— James Purdy

Feeling is taboo, especially in New York. I read in some little magazine the other day that The New Yorker and The…

— James Purdy

I am against all machines. It's no wonder that so many Americans go on dope when they have no other cultural stimulus…

— James Purdy

There's the world of the newspapers. They believe that what is happening is happening, which is so naïve. Because they're the first…

— James Purdy

Margaret Meade is always running around saying that marijuana's just like bread and water! Well, bread and water are poison, and marijuana's…

— James Purdy

I don't have any home. Everyone I grew up with, my family, are all dead. So I feel kind of like a…

— James Purdy

I've never been in fashion. Not at all.

— James Purdy

“Writing is like a battle. You’re often so into it you don’t have any high ideals. You’re just doing it. I have…

— James Purdy

None of my books are best-sellers. In fact, the only thing that's kept me alive is the books that are in paperback.…

— James Purdy

Television masturbates its audience even though the audience is not really watching. It masturbates orifices the audience doesn't have. It sticks holes…

— James Purdy

The worse the author, the more he is known.

— James Purdy

“Just like children, he and the greatwoman Grainger longed, and especially demanded even, that something should happen, or again Parkhearst would cry,…

— James Purdy

I think America, really, is over.

— James Purdy

The public is totally illiterate in America. It can't read at all. It's absolutely insensitive to words.

— James Purdy

“One morning while drinking coffee with Amos, Daniel Haws looked up suddenly, as if feeling the boy’s eyes on him, and said:…

— James Purdy

There are no manners left in America at all, because all you're doing is kicking the person next to you so that…

— James Purdy

“He stood there, his eyes like they had been before. Their beauty stabbed at her heart like a great knife; the hair…

— James Purdy

The world is telling you through The New York Times and The New York Review of Books "You must shut up. You…

— James Purdy

I wish people would call poisons poison. I don't mind people smoking marijuana, but they should admit it's a poison, and coffee's…

— James Purdy

As always, I wonder if I'll get through the winter. Then when winter is over, I wonder about the summer. But that's…

— James Purdy

Almost everything official in America is a huge fraud.

— James Purdy

There's really nothing wrong with sentimentality... Nothing I wrote is sentimental.

— James Purdy

New York establishment isn't really a literary establishment. It's just a collection of broken down old newspaper hacks who pass judgment on…

— James Purdy