What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living. Harry Crews More Quotes by Harry Crews More Quotes From Harry Crews There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with. Harry Crews broken-heart hurt beautiful I never wanted to be well-rounded. I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design. Harry Crews creativity cutting work Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them. Harry Crews writing men thinking The writers job is to get naked, To hide nothing. To look away from nothing. To look at it. To not blink. To be not embarrassed or shamed of it. Strip it down and lets get down to where the blood is, the bone is. Instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff, luxury! Harry Crews luxury jobs blood Alcohol whipped me. Alcohol and I had many, many marvelous times together. We laughed, we talked, we danced at the party together; then one day I woke up and the band had gone home and I was lying in the broken glass with a shirt full of puke and I said, 'Hey, man, the ball game's up'. Harry Crews party home lying The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked, the right way and the way that was not so right. Harry Crews understanding stories world There ought to be a law against the sun rising and setting for you in somebody else. Harry Crews rising law sun If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you've been told. Harry Crews writing heaven lying If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. ‘Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week. Harry Crews writing zoos book I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it-you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world. Harry Crews bullshit sports thinking The artist lives in an atmosphere of perpetual failure. Harry Crews creativity artist inspirational The writer's job is to get naked. Harry Crews naked jobs Hell came right along with God, hand in hand. The stink of sulfur swirled in the air of the church, fire burned in the aisles, and brimstone rained out of the rafters. From the evangelist's oven mouth spewed images of a place with pitchforks, and devils, and lakes of fire that burned forever. God had fixed a place like that because he loved us so much. Harry Crews fire air lakes I believe some people are just too damn smart to write fiction. Harry Crews smart writing believe Survival is triumph enough. Harry Crews triumph survival enough Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober. Harry Crews men world needs Men to whom God is dead worship one another. Harry Crews god-is-dead worship men We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Becauwse we really don't lov what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems - if you really loved it - you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. ... Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people. Harry Crews rotten writing people That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night. Harry Crews decision once-upon-a-time night I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn't have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful. Harry Crews eye hurt beautiful
