Norman Spinrad Quotes

Here, in the company of the mindless trees, the free-flying birds, the bugs and frogs that passed from stimulus directly to response without the interval of consciousness between, did I hope to lose myself in the living mandala of evolution’s less self-tortured forms.

True civilization consists precisely of conventions, rituals, and modes of oblique communication whereby the chaos within and the void without may be expressed and contained within the harmonious consensus of shared social objectivity, thus maintaining our bubble of crafted reality, the necessary illusion.

The saddest day of your life isn't when you decide to sell out. The saddest day of your life is when you decide to sell out and nobody wants to buy.

Was not the arbitrary distinction between illusion and reality the ultimate illusion itself?

To become aware of a controlling process is to transcend the determinism of that process.

I could not deny that my spirit was amorally attracted to this ultimate temptation as my conscience was morally repelled by it.

For truth be told, I was tormented by perceptions and their corollary temptation which from a social definition rendered me unsane, though from a more absolute viewpoint what I might be said to have been suffering from was an excess of insight.