Top 35 James Purdy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I don’t think it’s like eastern mysticism, which leaves the person whole. It’s really another form of cancer, television.”

— James Purdy

2. “In a competitive society, the thing people fear the most is love.”

— James Purdy

3. “I wish people would call poisons poison. I don’t mind people smoking marijuana, but they should admit it’s a poison, and coffee’s a poison, but the Americans lie so.”

— James Purdy

4. “The world is telling you through The New York Times and The New York Review of Books “You must shut up. You must never appear again. Because you are not relevant to us.” So you have to fight their attempt to destroy you, fight to continue feeling.”

— James Purdy

5. “I don’t have any home. Everyone I grew up with, my family, are all dead. So I feel kind of like a ghost. I’m more interested in the past.”

— James Purdy

6. “Feeling is taboo, especially in New York. I read in some little magazine the other day that The New Yorker and The New York Times were sclerotic, meaning, “completely turned to rock.” The critics here are that way.”

— James Purdy

7. “Almost everything official in America is a huge fraud.”

— James Purdy

8. “Margaret Meade is always running around saying that marijuana’s just like bread and water! Well, bread and water are poison, and marijuana’s a poison. Now, if you like poison, why shouldn’t you have it? But don’t try to pretend that it’s innocuous.”

— James Purdy

9. “Why, if Daniel Haws was to take out his naked cock and shake it in your face, you’d die of apoplexy.”

— James Purdy

10. “I think fame is something that you’ve achieved in your inner self that becomes known to others outside you. There are really very few famous people in history.”

— James Purdy

11. “I am against all machines. It’s no wonder that so many Americans go on dope when they have no other cultural stimulus than a television.”

— James Purdy

12. “The New York Times is the worst newspaper in the world and it’s extremely vicious to artists.”

— James Purdy

13. “The public is totally illiterate in America. It can’t read at all. It’s absolutely insensitive to words.”

— James Purdy

14. “Actually, television tells you to take dope. It tells you to destroy the human race really, by first having more consumers and then consuming more poison and then making the whole planet uninhabitable.”

— James Purdy

15. “There are no manners left in America at all, because all you’re doing is kicking the person next to you so that you can consume more, see more, and get more.”

— James Purdy

16. “Never deprecate another person’s sufferings even when imaginary.”

— James Purdy

17. “None of my books are best-sellers. In fact, the only thing that’s kept me alive is the books that are in paperback. People find them, they like them, and they pass them on.”

— James Purdy

18. “New York establishment isn’t really a literary establishment. It’s just a collection of broken down old newspaper hacks who pass judgment on books that they have not even read, with assuredness of Jehova.”

— James Purdy

19. “No one looks at a television, and no one hears it. It’s a poison.”

— James Purdy

20. “Television masturbates its audience even though the audience is not really watching. It masturbates orifices the audience doesn’t have. It sticks holes in the viewer and masturbates in those holes. Then it finally gets into the brain and masturbates there, too.”

— James Purdy

21. “Amos, talk about pearls for teeth... you got ’em. No wonder the boys go for you, because I could too and if I had something to push between those pearly teeth I’d be first in line.”

— James Purdy

22. “I don’t think I’d like it if people liked me, I’d think that something had gone wrong.”

— James Purdy

23. “I think America, really, is over.”

— James Purdy

24. “Some people confess in the flesh, others on paper.”

— James Purdy

25. “If the book’s bad enough, they’ll publish it, and if it’s bad bad enough, the daily reviewers will love it, and it’ll sell.”

— James Purdy

26. “Publishers seem to be in an alcoholic haze most of the time. Well, the publishers have no idea what a writer is.”

— James Purdy

27. “And yet Curt’s a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that’s all.”

— James Purdy

28. “If you’re a writer, you have to be an egomaniac. You have to just believe in yourself, which is hard work.”

— James Purdy

29. “Great books, if long enough and full of topical description and contemporary comment, were now coming into even wider public favor. The lengthier and fuller of comment, the better.”

— James Purdy

30. “I’ve never been in fashion. Not at all.”

— James Purdy

31. “She made no point of concealing the truth, for the truth was all she could bear now.”

— James Purdy

32. “He’s America in action – opposed to quality.”

— James Purdy

33. “Most journalists are broken down alcoholics.”

— James Purdy

34. “Mexican marijuana, which he called the schoolboy’s consolation.”

— James Purdy

35. “The worse the author, the more he is known.”

— James Purdy

36. “New York has collapsed.”

— James Purdy

37. “Most books don’t even come into the world with the noise of the still-born.”

— James Purdy