“Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”

“In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with David Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He's found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it's smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., "hiply") surreal [...] D. Lynch is an exponentially better filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. A better way to put what I just tried to say: Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”

“My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.”

“The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.”

“There is something deeply surreal about standing behind a female performer in hotpink peau de soie, a woman whose clitoris and perineum you have priorly seen, and watching her try to get a microwaved egg roll onto her plate with a cocktail fork.—David Foster Wallace, “Big Red Son” (1998)”

“Hang me upside-down and fuck me in both ears. You pulled yourself out of a clinical depression by being a freaking hero.”

“Abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting.”