“To be an awake American, you realize the confrontational battlfield you live in. Everything is political here. Money is your last line of defense between you and the street. Do drugs? Bad battle strategy to me. Overweight, too slow, you will lose. Take your eye off the ball, someone will take your lunch and eat in front of you. That’s America. You want to tell the truth? You will learn confrontation. For me, art was always a vehicle for all of that. It has never been for art’s sake. I throw out insults like chum. I want the clash.”

- Henry Rollins, August 2008

“I think my writing is so visual, it’s like shooting a film. When I write a poem or novel or anything, I see everything autonomously, visually, inwardly; that’s how I work. I feel much closer to photography than painting because photography encapsulates image, isolates the image. I have a very intensely individual world but it’s shared by other people of course.”

- Jeremy Reed, December 2005

“I think the conventional modernist novel is a great comfort to the middle classes who still refer to people as ‘little Chinamen’ and that ‘awfully nice Indian chap’ and in a way its shift into Asian dress isn’t all that surprising. If the medium is the message, as I think it often is, it doesn’t really matter whether V.S.Naipaul, Julian Barnes or Salman Rushdie wrote it - the fundamental tone is that of a familiar lullaby. If that’s what you want, well and good, but you ought to know you’re sucking on the genre conventions to which you are addicted. I find most of the middle-brow fiction around - Amis, McEwen, Byatt and so on - offers more comfort than it does confrontation.”

- Michael Moorcock, March 2002

“I am hugely attracted to the idea of life as a mistake, as a kind of natural error for which we try and find some metaphysical assurance or consolation. This is the core of Schopenhauer’s dark comic genius. It attracts me because it is based on the idea of life as rooted in an experience of contingency, physical contingency, which we forget and convert into various forms of necessity. I do see a lineage from forms of ancient skepticism and cynicism through Schopenhauer and into figures like Beckett and Cioran. One of the peculiar features of The Book of Dead Philosophers is that I simultaneously play on a number of different and contradictory tendencies in the history of the last few thousand years: cynicism, skepticism, Epicureanism, primitive Christianity, occasionalism, rationalism. The fragmentary form of the book allows me to move across and through a number of different philosophical registers. It is so ridiculous to limit oneself to one version of the truth.”

- Simon Critchley, June 2008

“”Art is supposed to be unconventional which is why I detest genre writing of all kinds. I mean, it’s comforting for the people who read it - but they are morons. Because they know that Joe will get murdered and somebody else will figure out why or how. Or some spy will figure out how to prevent terrorists from taking over the world. I don’t really care. It doesn’t interest me. I want to be taken away to a different place every time. Denis Johnson does this. He’s one of my favourite writers in America. He’s very unique.”

- T.C. Boyle, June 2003

“I think the general consensus on the New Puritans is that we were all a load of wankers with an over-inflated sense of what we were doing. If I hadn’t been part of it, perhaps I would have thought that too - after all, I’m not sure we put across what we were trying to do in the most diplomatic way. But I can’t resist a manifesto, and it was a good idea.”

- Scarlett Thomas, June 2005