Andrei Codrescu Quotations

Most artists don't get paid for what they do, and they are lucky if they can persuade a friend to let them show something at a kid's birthday party.

Americans are accustomed to welcoming, or at least receiving, refugees from other countries, not creating our own.

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

New Orleans reminds me of Romania because New Orleans is very corrupt politically.

Real artists free of the tedium of money can use, now, all of society as an idea factory.

After so many years, I feel more American than anything else, but I'm also Romanian and whatever other oddities of temperament I picked up elsewhere, in Transylvania or France, for instance. These days, everybody is both an exile and a resident - they don't call it the global village for nothing.

My mother and I were part of a deal in the mid-'60s between Romania and Israel. Israel bought freedom for Romanian Jews for $2,000 a head. Ceausescu made a bundle in hard currency. He also 'sold' ethnic Germans to West Germany. Instead of going to Israel, my mother and I came to the United States.

Romanians are culturally European, very close to the French. Socially, they are now building a society that is emotionally closer to the Balkans, Turkey and Greece.

Romanians have a particular love for poetry and have a beautiful, vivid language. The poets they love are not versifiers like Vadim Tudor, but genuinely complex mystical souls like Mircea Cartarescu.

There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.

I wish somebody told me don't take candy from strangers when I made my first tax-free Internet purchase. I wish that I had remembered the first one's free, which is how dealers make new junkies. I wish that every cliche humanity acquired to protect itself from its history of bamboozlement and trickery was sewn on every shirt pocket by a smart mom.

The evaporation of 4 million who believe in this crap would leave the world a better place.

Only the poor can create art.

Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share.

It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold.

The time has come for writers to become inaccessible again. The reason is not some kind of 'mystique' that makes people curious (though it helps), but the fact that no real writers ever lay down anything real in public-they work in solitude, they think hard, and their thoughts are rarely nice or 'friendly.'

The worst part about zombies raging unchecked is the slow paralysis that they induce in people who aren't quite zombies yet. The rest of us un-zombies turn our heads, hoping the ghouls will just go away.

These are the poems of a traveler and a lover who feels both the terror of time passing and the consolation of eternity. From such tension spring lovely poetic objects, ready for intelligent use.

It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.

The peasants of all lands recognize power and they salute it, whether it's good or evil.

There is no ´Complete Idiots Guide to Creationism,´ but perhaps one is not needed.

In the grand collage that is Dada, past and future are equally usable.

How did you fall in love with New Orleans? At once, madly. Looking back, sometimes I think it was predestined.

Cookbooks bear the same relation to real books that microwave food bears to your grandmother?s.

The real technology -behind all our other technologies- is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.

There is a velvety sensuality here at the mouth of the Mississippi that you won't find anywhere else. Tell me what the air feels like at 3 A.M. on a Thursday night in August in Shaker Heights and I bet you won't be able to say because nobody stays up that late. But in New Orleans, I tell you, it's ink and honey passed through silver moonlight.

Two-thirds of what we call New Orleans culture is really myth-making, ... People feed myths of the city back to the city. These myths are now in pieces.