Book detail: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book features a series of postcards, each accompanied by a short essay, providing a unique perspective on American life and its complexities. Ed Ruscha's distinctive style and wit are evident throughout, offering readers a glimpse into the mind of an influential artist and cultural critic.
The quotes below use the same card format as the rest of the site, including topics, source notes, copy actions, image creation, and sharing controls.
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“A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“I suppose each of us has his own fantasy of how he wants to die. I would like to go out in a blaze of glory, myself, or maybe simply disappear someday, far out in the heart of the wilderness I love, all by myself, alone with the Universe and whatever God may happen to be looking on. Disappear - and never return. That's my fantasy.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Anyone not paranoid in this world must be crazy. . . . Speaking of paranoia, it's true that I do not know exactly who my enemies are. But that of course is exactly why I'm paranoid.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Not all questions can be answered.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest - next only to lust.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of cliches, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“A house built on greed cannot long endure.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Simply because humankind have the power now to meddle or 'manage' or 'exercise stewardship' in every nook and cranny of the world does not mean that we have a right to do so. Even less, the obligation.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government - and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or disliked, has some kind of a role and place in the community. I never felt that living in a city - as I once did for a couple of years.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over the place, trees leafing out, streams gushing down from the mountains. Great time of year for hiking, camping, exploring, sleeping under the new moon and the old stars. At dawn and at evening we hear the coyotes howling with excitement—mating season.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a hundred books, a thousand theories, a million words. Now as always we need heroes. And heroines! Down with the passive and the limp.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“The gross evil of our time defies all labels.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Hard times are a-coming, and people without useful, practical skills are going to suffer. Or suffer most.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth - with a capital G. 'Progress' in our nation has for too long been confused with 'Growth'; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better - toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief - but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Our institutions are too big; they represent not the best but the worst characteristics of human beings. By submitting to huge hierarchies of power, we gain freedom from personal responsibility for what we do and are forced to do - the seduction of it - but we lose the dignity of being real men and women. Power corrupts; attracts the worst and corrupts the best. ... Refuse to participate in evil; insist on taking part in what is healthy, generous, and responsible. Stand up, speak out, and when necessary fight back. Get down off the fence and lend a hand, grab a-hold, be a citizen - not a subject.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me. Not out of any foolish hope that one novelist, or all virtuous novelists in chorus, can make much of a difference for good, except in the long run, but out of the need to prevent the human world from relaxing into something worse. To maintain the tension between truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. ... I believe the highest duty of the serious novelist is, whatever the means or technique, to be a critic of his society, to hold society to its own ideals, or if these ideals are unworthy, to suggest better ideals.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“In fact, I suspect that our only hope is disaster. Cruel tho' it is to say it, there has got to be a vast die-off in the human population -- likely including us and our families -- before the survivors find themselves in a world where a new and humble and 'religious' adaptation with nature is possible.
Disaster is not necessary; the better world could be achieved through reason and common sense and a sense of fellowship -- but most of the present human world is dead set against us. Thus I was forced to the disagreeable resolutions (not solutions) which I attempted to sketch out in the novel 'Good News.' The title is of course deliberately ambiguous.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“I doubt that my sense of personal freedom is any stronger than anybody else's. I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce. Government, for example. The Army tried to train us to salute the uniform, not the man. Failed. I will salute the man, maybe, if I think he's worthy of it, but I don't salute uniforms anymore.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Most every charge you level at American capitalism applies with equal force to communism, with this nice difference, that the Reds make no pretense at such frivolities as civil liberties or environmentalism. The differences in degree are so great that they result in a radical difference in kind.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“And the so-called 'political process' is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic functionaries, like even our judges, are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interests.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Perhaps I shouldn't call it shit. That's a bit crude. I don't really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do despise is the contemporary inclination to flop to the knees and crawl back into the past, to shy from what seem like impossible problems in order to bury the head, asshole aloft and twitching, in the Sands of Time. Cowardice, I calls it. Illusion-seeking. Womb-crawling. And treason. Desertion in the face of the enemy.
Strong words indeed. But I've always been rather a blunt, tough, plain-spoken type . . .”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“In this respect the differences between the USA and the USSR are those of evangelical dinosaurs competing for domination on one small planet: the first deifies Jesus Christ, the other Karl Marx. Neither has much practical interest in what those two sincere and hard-working fellows actually preached.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“In any nation but the USA, it is taken for granted that a man of distinction, ability, wealth or power will keep a mistress and a few girlfriends on the side. Only in America, still suffering from its grotesque, hypocritical Puritan heritage, do we persist in attempting to deny and repeal a million years of basic primate biology.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“It is vital that we avoid any hint of moral superiority in our dealings with one another in the environmental movement; if it developed into factionalism it would destroy us, as factionalism has destroyed so many other progressive movements in America.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“I believe that the military-industrial state will eventually collapse, possibly even in our lifetime, and that a majority of us (if prepared) will muddle through to a freer, more open, less crowded, green and spacious agrarian society. (Maybe; of course it may be only a repeat of the middle ages.)”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“The more we learn of outer space and inner space, of quasars and quarks, of Big Bangs and Little Blips, the more remote, abstract and intellectually inconsequential it all becomes.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast