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Quote by Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Being known by, or getting the attention of, millions of people is almost always wasted on someone who is neither thought-provoking nor knowledgeable … or at least funny.”

Quote by Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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“Lei si siede nell’angolo del divano. Discreta come se fosse solo di passaggio. Vedendola seduta lì, vicino a me, capisco che da troppo tempo non la guardo. Ho conservato in me anche i minimi dettagli dei suoi tratti. La sua bellezza è sempre stata un mistero per me. Un’entità che non ho mai saputo scomporre. Un tutto, sensuale e femminile, desiderabile e materno, fragile e incrollabile. Più di una volta avrei voluto mangiarla. La sua pelle, la sua carne di mela e il suo sapore zuccherino. Ho scritto il mio primo racconto e l’ho divorata, l’ho inghiottita, senza lasciare niente. Ho posato il suo corpo sulle mie pagine e il libro si è richiuso. Quello che mi aveva impedito di fare dodici anni prima posando la sua mano sulla mia l’avevo fatto alle sue spalle, senza che lei potesse dire niente, senza che potesse farmi ragionare. Oggi che la nostra storia è diventata una storia, che i nostri personaggi vivono in autonomia, è tempo di ritrovarla.”

FameAmoreMemoriaDesiderioRicordoAntoine LeirisNoi Due
Book:La Vie, après
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“Imagine if you looked different to every person who saw you. Not, like, some people thought you were more or less attractive, but one person thinks you're a sixty-five-year-old cowboy from Wyoming complete with boots and hat and leathery skin, and the next person sees an eleven-year-old girl wearing a baseball uniform. You have no control over this, and what you look like has nothing to do with the life you have lived or even your genome. You have no idea what each person sees when they look at you. That's what fame is like. You think this sounds like beauty because we sometimes say that beauty is all in the eye of the one beholding the beauty. And, indeed, we don't get to decide if we are beautiful. Different people will have different opinions, and the only person who gets to decide if I'm attractive is the person looking at me. But then there is some consensus about what attractive is. Beauty is an attribute defined by human nature and culture. I can see my eyes and my lips and my boobs when I look in a mirror. I know what I look like. Fame is not this way. A person's fame is in everyone's head except their own. You could be checking into your flight at the airport and 999 people will see you as just another face in the crowd. The thousandth might think you're more famous than Jesus. As you can imagine, this makes fame pretty disorienting. You never know who knows what. You never know if someone is looking at you because you went to college with them or because they've been watching your videos or listening to your music or reading about you in magazines for years. You never know if they know you and love you. Worse, you never know if they know you and hate you.”

Fame
Book:An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
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“Hollywood Boulevard at night was a dream in neon. Mickey cruised along the strip, colorful lights blurring by like hallucinations. On his right, the El Capitan Theatre lured customers in like a Vegas casino, while the Walk of Fame preserved stardom on his left. Tourists bustled beneath the blinking signs like extras in the giant story of this land of stories, hoping for a real-life glimpse of that other world just behind the veneer of this place. In the ’50s, Hollywood Boulevard had looked different—less buildings, less vehicles, less pedestrians—but the aura of the strip, the energy, hadn’t changed at all.”

FilmFameHollywoodCaliforniaCinemaLos AngelesNoirFamousLaWalk Of Fame
Book:Porno Valley
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“It wasn’t only benches, Charlie found, that bore names on them. There were rocks with names, buildings with names, parks with names, streets with names, even tables with names. Charlie thought it was a wildly large ask for a man to expect people to know who he was after he’d left. It’s too hard to compete with the excited men today who want to be remembered tomorrow. But no one could ever live that long. We don’t remember Lincoln every hour, or Jackie Robinson every meal. Charlie supposed the only solace a man could own is knowing he did plenty of good things in the time he had. It was all we got and a noble insufficiency was enough. He also figured if you were going to make a bench, not to inscribe your name on it, but instead something awesome like, “This Bench Was Made with One Hand.” No fool was going to remember your name, for God’s sake. But they might laugh at a spectacle such as a one-handed achievement.”

FameExpectationsVanityImmortalityParksBenchesCelebrityThe Goodbye SongFamous PeopleInaugurations
Book:The Goodbye Song
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“These people have already attained, at whatever age, a degree of celebrity you a--holes will never reach, and you feel, deep down, that because there is no life before or after this, that fame is, essentially, God -- all you people know that, believe it, even if you don't admit it. As children you watched him, in the basement, cross-legged in front of the TV, and you thought you should be him, that his lines were yours, that his spot on Battle of the Network Stars was yours, that you'd be so good on the obstacle course - you'd win for sure! So doing all this, when he's no longer such the world-conquering celebrity, gives you power over him, the ability to embarrass him, to equalize the terrible imbalance you feel about your relationship to those who project their charisma directly, not sublimated through snarky little magazines. You and everyone like you, with your Q&As or columns or Web sites - you all want to be famous, you want to be rock stars, but you're stuck in this terrible bind, where you also want to be thought of as smart, legitimate, permanent. So you do your little thing, are read by your little coterie, while secretly seething about the Winona Ryders and Ethan Hawkes.”

SuccessFame
Book:A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
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