Top 140 Karl Wiggins Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 3

101. “I’ve sat in restaurants and viewed the food on the plate as I would a half-blooded mongrel. I may feel sorry for it and given time even get to like it a little, but it’s never going to really gain my affections. The plate in front of you should tantalize, seduce and enchant you. It should be a cheeky devil, a minx, a hussy even, but never a desperado.”

— Karl Wiggins

102. “She was abused and tormented, and despite all the drug abuse seemed to float through a world where she did not belong. Whatever went on behind those beautiful eyes, you cannot help feeling that only the fairies and leprechauns will recognise Edie Sedgwick.”

— Karl Wiggins

103. “As they call last orders, he’ll walk over to a girl he’s no doubt slept with before, pour half his pint over his own head and the remainder over hers, and with a twinkle in his eye say, “Looks like you’ve pulled again, doesn’t it?”

— Karl Wiggins

104. “Many parts of Watford, especially around Vicarage Road Football Stadium, consist of scuzy warrens of Victorian terraced houses.”

— Karl Wiggins

105. “There is nothing more annoying than somebody who is really thick but who believes with absolute conviction that he is more intelligent than you.”

— Karl Wiggins

106. “I may well be bringing fresh notions or concepts that will cause many people to think of me as a bit odd, but I’m okay with that, because maybe I’m just conscious and alive in a batty old world. That said, it doesn’t mean everyone will ‘get’ me, there are a million aromas and zings and zaps and tangs and wallops in the world. We all have a different piquancy. What I do mean, however, is that my tribe can find me.”

— Karl Wiggins

107. “Americans tend to think that korma is the curry of choice for the Caucasian, and it is if you’re a white guy with no balls.”

— Karl Wiggins

108. “Words are the writer’s hocus-pocus, our dark arts and our deception. They’re our charm and our temptation. Sometimes the writer overindulges himself and it gets out of hand, but that’s how we like it, it’s how we’ve ghosted some of our best creations.”

— Karl Wiggins

109. “Magic can be so draining.”

— Karl Wiggins

110. “Words are the writer’s sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They’re our enchantment and our temptation.”

— Karl Wiggins

111. “You feel as if your Earthwalk is a mission of some sorts, but you can’t quite remember what that mission is, and whatever it is you don’t seem to be accomplishing it. In other words, you’re a little bit disheartened. And maybe a little touched.”

— Karl Wiggins

112. “I know for a fact that if a country took me in and offered me assistance, I would be on my best behaviour forever! I would show total respect to the people of that nation and their laws. And I certainly wouldn’t expect special treatment.”

— Karl Wiggins

113. “Life picks us up and throws us around, but for the most part we’re aimed in the right direction where we can learn the lessons of our Earthwalk.”

— Karl Wiggins

114. “The Apprentice: the candidates’ combination of being desperate, totally pointless yet surprisingly pompous is extremely watchable.”

— Karl Wiggins

115. “I write in my head on the way home from work, or when mowing the lawn, or on a night out with friends. Sometimes I find the time to capture those words that are rolling through my mind, quivering and drumming and swimming, banging into each other until I can finally trick them and leak them out onto the page. And sometimes I don’t. Writers are like that.”

— Karl Wiggins

116. “There are hundreds of thousands of musicians, artists, painters, poets, writers and bricklayers, and we certainly need walls, music and art, but I truly believe that what some of them do comes from a higher source.”

— Karl Wiggins

117. “When I was young I lived in several different countries, and we HAD to find work because there were no welfare state options open to us in those countries. And do you know what? We went out and found work. We had no choice.”

— Karl Wiggins

118. “The Philosopher-Poet’s mind is always in the here-and-now when he’s with his tribe and elsewhere in the red universe when he’s on his own.”

— Karl Wiggins

119. “Have you seen the state of some of these vegetarians? They look like they’re going to drop down dead any minute. We didn’t fight our way to the top of the food chain to be vegetarians, did we? Can you imagine a fry-up without the sausage and bacon? Or not being able to order steak, egg and chips? Can you imagine Christmas dinner without the turkey? Or a barbeque without the ribs?”

— Karl Wiggins

120. “Arsenal play pretty-boy football. Good to watch on the telly, but there’s no real grit in their play.”

— Karl Wiggins

121. “Every one of the big breakthroughs in the art of literature have possibly started as what many would call a ludicrous or even laughable idea as the writer occasionally balances a routine piece with an investment in the eccentric and untried. Over time, the reward is usually worth the risk.”

— Karl Wiggins

122. “If everyone’s going to think of me as a lunatic then I may as well benefit from it. At least it’ll redeem me from being mediocre.”

— Karl Wiggins

123. “Frida Kahlo had found her passion in colour, she painted with intensity and she cherished her loves with every ounce of her bones. She stood up for things of importance, and she never ever apologised for who she was.”

— Karl Wiggins

124. “Life is the feel of a coral sunset over a slow-moving river. Memories of jungles and deserts and dark winds from Java. And if you really listen, you can still hear the high plains drums in New Mexico, for deep inside of you is the spirit of your past.”

— Karl Wiggins

125. “Quotes from Ancient Greece are mostly all bollocks.”

— Karl Wiggins

126. “People invariably ask Carefree Scamps, “Where did you get that jumper?” or, “Where did you get that dress?” The answer is quite possibly Camden Market, but they won’t be able to remember. They’ll simply answer something like, “I dunno, I’ve had it for ages.”

— Karl Wiggins

127. “The joining of humans and Djinni in marriage is still practiced in some parts of the world, and the Queen of Sheba was rumoured – by both the Jews and the Arabs – to be part Djinn.”

— Karl Wiggins

128. “And then one day we found ourselves in a cornfield. After that it seemed like the whole world was made of corn. It was just the same cornfield over and over. I got to thinking that we’d suddenly be out of it and the Manhattan skyline would pop right up on the other side. But that never happened. The corn went on forever. But eventually we hit the slave state of Missouri, with its constant panorama of rural beauty.”

— Karl Wiggins

129. “You can understand how the same word used to describe Gypsies in Western Europe came to also describe the poor artists of the Parisian slums.”

— Karl Wiggins

130. “We took 9000 fans to The Emirates to play Arsenal in the quarter-finals of the FA Cup, and we sang non-stop. But the place is a bloody library! About every twenty minutes or so their 40,000 crowd would half-heartedly sing their Ars-suh-nul song, and to encourage them we’d give them a round of applause. But even that didn’t work. Whatever we did we couldn’t give their fans the much-needed boost they evidently needed to support their own team.”

— Karl Wiggins

131. “The ability to step aside from the rest of the world has given the Gypsies a lot of survival skills to match their really dark sense of humour. The Gypsies are survivors.”

— Karl Wiggins

132. “New Agers can often be a precious breed of born-again goody-goodies. They are unbelievably delusional about their own spirituality, fully believing they’re the reincarnation of Julius Caesar or Cleopatra.”

— Karl Wiggins

133. “If a fairly substantial percentage of the money you and I work hard for is to be given to people too lazy to drag their arses out of bed at six o’clock in the morning, then we need assurance that they’re not spending our money on booze and drugs.”

— Karl Wiggins

134. “He was incorrigible, yet you can’t help but love him. His devil-may-care attitude, his brash nature and his vivaciousness aligned with his self-assertive and fearless nature gave birth to a Star who most people will, never, ever see the likes of. People like Sixteen-String Jack are wild, untameable and impossible to forget.”

— Karl Wiggins

135. “We owe shelter and welfare to people who were either born here or people who show a desire to not only integrate but become useful members of society. And certainly, nobody else.”

— Karl Wiggins

136. “Keith Moon had no off-switch and there was no way of controlling him.”

— Karl Wiggins

137. “Over the last few years I’ve felt as if I’m a walk-in, as if some kind of soul transference has taken place, as if a different soul – well, me I suppose – had just walked into my body and picked up my memories.”

— Karl Wiggins

138. “If a Shaman, sorcerer or medicine man attempts to convey insight, it’ll more than likely sound absurd to most people. Learning and culture can certainly be passed on to others, but not insight. You can discover it, allow it to exist within you, do magic through it, but you can’t teach it.”

— Karl Wiggins

139. “You see what your mother-in-law hasn’t yet realised is that she’s the one who needs to hold out the olive branch, not you, because she’s the one who’s going to want to come around more and more in the future to see her grand-kids. SHE needs to make friends with YOU, not the other way around.”

— Karl Wiggins

140. “A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure.”

— Karl Wiggins

141. “There’s a craziness in Wrong Planet people that means we teeter on the edge sometimes. It’s what makes us interesting.”

— Karl Wiggins

142. “To produce new works a writer will use a kind of sixth sense as well as the logical process. He’ll enjoy playing with words, and that’ll help his brain to relax and produce better ideas. His study is where he discovers order and finds hidden meanings in the words. He’ll enjoy expanding the boundaries of what is feasible, and is possibly motivated more by the writing itself than by the hard cash that is the reward for writing.”

— Karl Wiggins