Quotes from Thomas M. Disch

Sometimes the whole world is mud luscious and puddle wonderful

For a lot of people, poetry tends to be dull. It's not read much. It takes a special kind of training and a lot of practice to read poetry with pleasure. It's like learning to like asparagus.

Knowledge is devalued when it becomes too generally known

Science Fiction is a branch of children's literature.

All children... feel a demonic sympathy with those things that cause disorder in the grown-up world.

Sameness is what marketers want us to want.

the difficulty was in training the eye to see the whole world of usual forms -- patterns of brick, painted plaster, carved and carpentered wood -- not as "buildings" and "streets" but as an infinite series of free and arbitrary choices. There was no place in such a scheme for orders, styles, sophistication, taste. ("The Asian Shore")

From this it can be proved that the Arcadian mathematics, so primitive in other respects, is based upon a shrewd understanding of the physical properties of soap bubbles. ("Et in Arcadia Ego")

No wonder the man wins all his battles: He doesn't recognize defeat!

Were there opinion polls in hell? Probably! And probably one hundred percent of the damned were of the opinion that they should be in heaven, and the results of the polls were published every morning in hell's own newspaper and broadcast on TV, and there were protest rallies organized by demons, and long processions of the damned wailing and singing "We Shall Overcome.

The fascination of Germany in this century is the fascination of the abomination. You go there to catch a whiff of the smoke that still hangs in the air.

One might suppose from such a beginning that Friday is to be a futuristic James Bond adventure. It's not, though the action is often of that ilk. However, the action is rarely anything but icing on the cake and rarely servees to advance the plot. There is a plot, though the author contrives with great grace to let it all take place in the reader's peripheral vision.

Hell is not merely preferable to heaven-it's the only clear notion of an afterlife-of a goal worth striving toward-that human imagination has been able to devise.

Science fiction is not about predicting the future but examining the present.

Meanwhile, in the realm of Something Lower, where books are but numbers in a series, the hacks grind out and the presses print the sf equivalent of Silhouette Romances. The sheer mass of Perry Rhodan lookalikes and fantasy-gaming disguised as books is awesome in much the same way that Niagara Falls is awesome: there is so much of it and it never stops.

He (and anyone else who survived) learned to be as unscrupulous as the heroes in the pulp adventure magazines he'd read as a boy--sometimes, as unscrupulous as the villains.

Behold! Behold the black, ungrainèd flesh, The jaw's jeweled hinge that we can barely glimpse …

Genius is an infinite capacity for pain.

It considered trying to explain their error to them, but what would be the use? They would only go away with hurt feelings. You can't always expect people, or squirrels, to be rational.

All children... feel a demonic sympathy with those things that cause disorder in the grown-up world.

Though opposition is a hopeless task, acquiescence would be worse.

Here was a flower (the daisy reflected) strangely like itself and yet utterly unlike itself too. Such a paradox has often been the basis for the most impassioned love.

The end of the world. Let me tell you about the end of the world. It happened fifty years ago. Maybe a hundred. And since then it's been lovely. I mean it. Nobody tries to bother you. You can relax. You know what? I like the end of the world.

Knowledge is devalued when it becomes too generally known