Quotes from Andrei Codrescu

Romanians have a particular love for poetry and have a beautiful, vivid language. The poets they love are not versifiers like Vadim Tudor, but genuinely complex mystical souls like Mircea Cartarescu.

Most artists don't get paid for what they do, and they are lucky if they can persuade a friend to let them show something at a kid's birthday party.

The peasants of all lands recognize power and they salute it, whether it's good or evil.

I want a house that's mobile but stationary, situated in a safe place without borders, where the people are peace-loving.

People, not just writers, are attracted to New Orleans because it's full of stories and listeners who love nothing better to do than to listen to them.

The icons light up on his laptop, e-mail invites him to grow his penis, enlarge his breasts, refinance his house. All is well in the world.

The "normal" family is, after all, the source of what the Devil enjoys most: anxiety, mental illness, violence, evil thoughts, fear, and social unrest. What the devil hates are attempts to escape the quotidian horror of ordinariness. These escapes into art, into otherness, must give him headaches because they might, just might, lead to innocence.

Southern Journey: My Return to the Civil Rights Movement.

The difference between a modern artist and a Buddhist monk is in the approach. The artist goes into the void empt and returns with a souvenir, if you will. The monk approaches the void with a traditional body of knowledge and arrives at emptiness. Our world, no less than that of the monks, is full of junk that gets in the way of spiritual practice. The artist plays with the junk, the monk orders it into nothingness.

Matter of fact, the only certainty driving the economy is the certainty that boredom at faster and faster rates is inevitable.

He's got a bad case of something I call ethnic PMS. I think it sounds nicer than 'bloodlust.

He also stayed awake all night many times in the neon-lit insomnia of cities where the all-nighter is culturally certified and commercially mandated. But the all-nighter of the bohemian heroes was something else: it was spiritual work, the night shift; they stayed awake so the demons that haunt the world wouldn't get them in their sleep.

This concludes the story of my youth, Your Honor. I hope that you can see that I have been swayed since my birth by forces that are poorly countered with reason.

But if the story had been true, Klaus would have doubtlessly been executed by the Soviets after the revolt. But here he was now, decades later, unexecuted and beaming evil rays out of my TV.

There are certain cities and certain areas of certain cities where the official language is dreams. Venice is one. And Paris. North Beach in San Francisco. Wenceslaus Square in Prague. And New Orleans, the city that dreams stories. Writers come and eavesdrop and take some of those stories with them, but these are just a few drops from a Mississippi river of stories.

The Hungarian language, Magyar, resembles Finnish, Your Honor, though its lack of vowels could be attributed to them having been snatched by the wind when the horse-mounted nomad warriors shouted to one another. Allow me to quote Illirio Tepius, a Byzantine traveler, who wrote in 1232 that "when Hungarians speak, there is a windlike whistle that propels the words forward, as if they never dismounted.

Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share.

There is a velvety sensuality here at the mouth of the Mississippi that you won't find anywhere else. Tell me what the air feels like at 3 A.M. on a Thursday night in August in Shaker Heights and I bet you won't be able to say because nobody stays up that late. But in New Orleans, I tell you, it's ink and honey passed through silver moonlight.

It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.

Nosferatu is the daddy of modern American sex.

Poetry is again hip in America as people are beginning to refuse to die of boredom and to choke in the fog of their funny money.

The peasants of all lands recognize power and they salute it, whether it's good or evil.

With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.

It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold.