Quotes About Obscurity

I'm trying to remain unfamous.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

'The Man Who Loved Children,' Christina Stead's masterpiece, remains the most fabulous book that hardly anyone I know has read.

I find I have to walk a little faster in public these days, but it's very easy to remember when nobody had any idea who I was.

But as a reporter, that's how you know you're doing a good job - when no one's talking about you. And something has gone wrong if they are.

In hunting ideas for books, I look for stories about long-past events that once commanded the world's attention but that, for one reason or another, faded from contemporary awareness.

I think most of the impact I have over time most people will not actually know about.

He was dropped off directly in front of the Black Tower.

The writing gets done away from the keyboard and away from the studio in my head, in solitude. And then I come in and hopefully have something, then I wrestle with sounds and picture all day long. But the ideas usually come from a more obscure place, like a conversation with a director, a still somebody shows you, or whatever.

Growing up in South Australia, you didn't really hear about wrestling much. It was mostly on the weekends at stupid hours in the morning when I was playing sport.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

I could not write about 'ordinary people' because I am not in the least interested in them.

Many of the writers I admire - Melville, Dickinson, Kafka - were virtually invisible during their lifetimes. Art, I think, often has to dance around in the void.

People quickly grow accustomed to being the slaves of mystery.

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Even the Terrible Old Man who talks to leaden pendulums in bottles, buys groceries with centuried Spanish gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard of his antediluvian cottage in Water Street can only say these things were the same when his grandfather was a boy, and that must have been inconceivable ages ago, when Belcher or Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of His Majesty's Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.

Looking desultorily about, his attention had been drawn by a dull glimmering on one of the tables; and he had extricated the queer orblike stone from its shadowy, crowded position between an ugly little Aztec idol, the fossil egg of a dinornis, and an obscene fetish of black wood from the Niger.

All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation.

Nothing is more transient in our world, less stable and solid, than that form of success which brings fame; nothing comes swifter and more readily than oblivion.

We were film geeks. We devoured everything: really obscure art films, foreign films. We were the kind of guys that lived at the Cinematheque. But at the end of the day, your favorite movies are like everybody else's favorite movies. Because those are the movies that become a touch point where you can connect to other people.

I'd never seen Rigondeaux's face without it being obscured by headgear or a photograph of Fidel he was holding up after winning a tournament. Finally I saw him, only to recognize the saddest face I'd ever seen in Cuba.

There's nothing more frustrating than when you hear a track and you can never find out what it is.

There's something fascinating about record collector minds, hoards of quotes shared and dealt like cards, lines traded, images bought.