Quotes from Barry Hughart

To cherish perfection is to commit creative suicide, and every true artist knows that a masterpiece is an accident that should be burned.

A fool will study for twenty or thirty years and learn how to do something, but a wise man will study for twenty or thirty minutes and become an expert. In this world, it isn't ability that counts, but authority.

the emotional health of a village depended upon having a man whom everyone hated.

It was quite a shock for me to discover that crime was so easy that it was boring. I reluctantly turned to scholarship.

Immortality is a meaningless word unless invulnerability goes with it.

Of course there is a slight chance that somebody might want to give the Celestial Bookmaker a heart attack.

One of the previous possessors of the stone was Chuang Tzu. He had a disciple who spent seven years studying universal energy and then demonstrated his wisdom by walking across the surface of a river and back again, and Chuang Tzu broke into tears. 'Oh, my boy!' he sobbed. 'My poor, poor, boy! You spent seven years of your life learning to do that, and all the while old Meng has been running a ferry not two miles from here, and he only charges two copper coins.

I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the world.

Nothing on the face of this earth - and I do mean nothing - is half so dangerous as a children's story that happens to be real, and you and I are wandering blindfolded through a myth devised by a maniac.

Miser Shen is preparing to spend the night with a goat.

Within an hour we had a visit from a gentleman with shifty eyes and an interesting pattern of knife scars where his nose used to be

Ginseng hunters refer to the plant as chang-diang shen, "the root of lightning," because it is believed that it appears only on the spot where a small mountain spring has been dried up by a lightning bolt. After a life of three hundred years the green juice turns white and the plant acquires a soul. It is then able to take on human form, but it never becomes truly human because ginseng does not know the meaning of selfishness.

even a bad idea is better than no idea. Error can point the way to truth, while empty-headedness can only lead to more empty-headedness or to a career in politics.

Nothing on the face of this earth - and I do mean nothing - is half so dangerous as a children's story that happens to be real...

Men cannot come any closer to immortality without going insane.

Ch'he. Devoid of intelligence, deficiency of wit, silly, idiotic. Also used for borrowing and returning books.

Actually, no money would change hands because ours is a barter economy. The victim would take a credit slip through the door to the warehouse, and Ma the Grub would stare at it in disbelief and scream out to Fang. "Madman! Your lunatic generosity will drive us into bankruptcy! Who will feed your starving brats when we are reduced to tattered cloaks and begging bowls?" Then he would honor the credit slip with goods that had been marked up by 600 percent.

The abbot used to say that the emotional health of a village depended upon having a man whom everyone loved to hate, and Heaven had blessed us with two of them.

The supernatural can be very annoying until one finds the key that transforms it into science

He was almost gone. The abbot knelt and placed a small jade Buddha in the pawnbroker's hands and began to pray for his miserable soul. Fang's eyes opened one last time, and he looked blindly down at the jade Buddha, and he made a truly heroic effort. "Cheap, very cheap," he sneered. "No more than two hundred…." Then he too was dead.

Begin at the beginning as you understood it, proceed through the middle, continue to the end, and then stop, said Master Li, and he sauntered out to get drunk....

Strangest of all is the professional ginseng hunter, because for him it is not a plant but a religion.

He actually seemed to want an answer, so I shrugged and said, "A superior who inherited the job from an uncle rams a barge pole up his ass.

Is it any wonder that our greatest men have lurched rather than walked across the landscape as they hiccupped their way into history?" "Sir, that's the best autobiography I ever heard!" I said enthusiastically.