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Nothing is more hip than a corpse. The style is timeless. Death is trending.
Chris Campanioni -
The whole world had become a stage, in which the props were continually shifting, four extras reprising the roles of twenty-four characters and people I’d never seen before playing my most beloved ones.
Chris Campanioni
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The future is trash. Recycling it, re-arranging it. Making it beautiful again.
Chris Campanioni -
I couldn’t decide whether it was better to be the art, or the artist.
Chris Campanioni -
I walk by, seeing myself walk by on a bag, someone’s hands gripping the paper handles above my neck, my curved waist, my gleam of sweat, me, half a block away, and think, you don’t know self-fragmentation until it’s staring you in the face.
Chris Campanioni -
Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I’m not lonely, if that’s what it seems like. Always writing things down.
Chris Campanioni -
I wrote a trilogy out of order and then rearranged it, because the whole of life is like that - a cut up - and when you cut into the present, the future leaks out.
Chris Campanioni -
You can always feel the cool whisper of surveillance when the film hits your flesh, the eye of the camera or simply the camera eye . . . faces of passersby, clientele, unpaid extras change completely as soon as they’re no longer observed.
Chris Campanioni
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The mist after rain, uninterrupted rainfall on rooftops, pitter-patter intellect. The thoughts I leave behind like footsteps.
Chris Campanioni -
The convenient function of every celebrated machine for living is to produce machines to live in them.
Chris Campanioni -
When we are hungry we eat our ghosts.
Chris Campanioni -
And maybe I knew how to look at a person, that exact angle to display, the way to shift the light on my face, but now I looked vacant, empty, naked … and for a fraction of a second—maybe more, maybe even a full second—I gave them fear, and finally, like a reel of film had been removed and I had to wait for another to be inserted, I smiled again.
Chris Campanioni -
It's not enough to say it; you would need to take it out of your mouth, you would need to become it. You would need to become what you were born to be.
Chris Campanioni -
To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.
Chris Campanioni
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I want the reader to get the feeling that the text is trying to rearrange itself, upon every reading or in the act of reading. I don't want the presentation of narrative; I want a life told out of order.
Chris Campanioni -
It's television, after all. No one is dead, even when they die.
Chris Campanioni -
In the act of creation, as in all the arts, the soul should be felt in the face and the fingers and the tongue, even in the cavities.
Chris Campanioni -
Sometimes I feel as if I’m getting other people’s memories. Images I only recognize in dreams or TV, old films, faces I’ve never seen before and places I’ve never been . . . somebody’s switched the reel.
Chris Campanioni -
To own beauty is the first lie of it.
Chris Campanioni -
Live a life worth reading about. Then write it.
Chris Campanioni
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But it was all nothing and that was the artistic expression: Nothing. And nothing can be art. And more than that, nothing is the best art.
Chris Campanioni -
Literature sustains life because it captures death in its forward march. Clickety-clickety-clack, the wheels go round and round ...
Chris Campanioni -
Half of life is pretending. The other half is pretending.
Chris Campanioni -
Tangerine tango was still in. Cardigans without buttons were in. Bahia bands were in. Senhor do Bonfim. Make a wish? But hardly anyone considered the most radical move: be yourself. Beauty is always a revolutionary act.
Chris Campanioni