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Quote by Michael Bassey Johnson

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Michael Bassey Johnson

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“I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all. From this perspective, from what Unamuno called the 'tragic sense of life', from this despair, faith comes to the rescue, not only as something nonrational but in a sense irrational. For Unamuno the great symbol of a person of faith was his Spanish hero Don Quixote. Faith is indeed quixotic. It is absurd. Let us admit it. Let us concede to everything! To a rational mind the world looks like a world without God. It looks like a world with no hope for another life. To think otherwise, to believe in spite of appearances, is surely a kind of madness. The atheist sees clearly that windmills are in fact only windmills, that Dulcinea is just a poor country bumpkin with a homely face and an unpleasant smell. The atheist is a Sarah, justifiably laughing in her old age at Abraham's belief that God will give them a son. What can be said in reply? How can a fideist admit that faith is a kind of madness, a dream fed by passionate desire, and yet maintain that one is not mad to make the leap?”

“I was walking around in an almost blind, crazy rage of madness. There was a story burning a hole in my brain, and it was dying to come out on paper. It was begging of me to create it, but I didn’t know where to begin. A month after giving birth to the idea, I felt like I was losing my mind. Ideas would pop into my head in the middle of the night, or during a midterm, and I missed them, quite narrowly, almost every time. Every time an idea left my mind without taking the shape of a word on paper, my mind would automatically begin to churn something just as impressive, or at least close to it. I was digging myself into a shallow grave, and I was getting nowhere. And this was even before the thoughts were committed to paper.”

“Every town has a psychopath or two. Not just the everyday crazy person, either. Not like Crazy Larry, the paint huffing weirdo peddling around town on a child-sized Huffy ranting about the end of the world, or the old lady dressed in rags who hands out filthy doll clothes to the kiddies. I'm talking about the cold, never remorseful lunatic, who may never have seemed insane up until the day he hacked apart his mother and shoved her stinking corpse into the attic. This town is overflowing with them; bloodcurdling murderers like Kenny Wayne Hilbert, Charlie Fender…Orland Winthro. And Al, the crazy had to come from somewhere.”

“Many writers make the mistake of making their readers appear like Lazarus, without any iota of care, throwing down books to readers to crunch as if they are dogs.”