Richard Brautigan's Quotes

It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become more difficult.

All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.

Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?

I didn't know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come.

I don't want my daughter to be educated. I think women should just be decorative.

I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.

I'm in a constant process of thinking about things.

As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.

Falling in love with landscapes is what L.A. women do. It doesn't necessarily imply betrothal or marriage.

I have a great ability to improvise verbally, and I am very funny on a dime.

I'm manic-depressive, technically bi-polar II with many borderline features.

If you can be anything else but a writer, be it.

Unfortunately, the more chaotic the society, the greater is the desire for conservative, nonconfrontational art.

I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.

I've written books as acts of discovery: things I need to know and that I need to touch. And it's very dangerous work to deal with the most toxic internal elements... I feel like Madame Curie at my computer. I feel like I should be hemorrhaging from my eyes and ears.

Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and unpredictable.

There's a bizarre prejudice that exists in the New York publishing establishment that any work outside the tri-state area is being done by trained chimpanzees, that geography screens out sensibility. There's an idea that all Los Angeles writing is about the movie industry, that it's vulgar, shallow and banal.

You don't just leave Los Angeles. Such a departure requires magical intervention. You can't simply purchase a ticket to another destination. You must disappear.

I am interested in the study of music and the discipline of music and the experience of music and music as a esoteric mechanism to continue my real intentions.

Everybody in America is angry about something.

I am viewed as the Negro who has gone outside of the categories assigned to me.

I have learned through time that not everyone is interested in the kinds of things that fascinate me.

I'm seeking to have an art that is engaged as a way for saying, 'Hurray for unity.'

My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.

So, yes, I am in the underground, but actually, it feels like home.

The word music is a convenient way to talk about what I'm interested in, but actually, in some ways, it's a limitation.