Five epigraphs for One Yes & Many Know

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So I started writing a novel about an artist who tries to sell out. Then I realized it was a mistake to drop the novel I was already writing, when I was in the middle of it (and it had been going well.) So I went back to writing my novel about an unbeliever who attempts to find god and realizes that the true name of god is treason. Which will be, when I finish it, the final part of some kind of trilogy based loosely around the desire for utopia, a trilogy that has already begun with the publication of Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim this past September. But back to the topic of trying to sell out. I wrote one chapter and a bit of that idea before setting it aside (for now.) And also compiled a page of epigraphs which you will find below.


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At the age of forty the life I have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all my notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds I would perform, was somewhere else. I realised it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless I did something. Unless I took one last gamble.
– Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Vol. 2 (A Man in Love)



I had an unhealthy respect for the artist who sells out. Not everyone can sell out, even if they want to. Over the years, I have noticed that the strength of singers like Adam Ant and Billy Idol was their ability to sell their asses and still appear to be doing precisely what they wanted.
– Julian Cope, Repossessed



I hushed it, heard my conscience in a clear voice
“Don’t forsake us to make this a career choice”
– Ka, 30 Keys



Work your ass off to change the language & dont ever get famous.
– Bernadette Mayer, Experiments



Success is the ethical quagmire par excellence of commodity culture because it jeopardizes our relation to dissent, to resistance, to saying no, as fame is precisely about what one is willing to do, how far one is willing to go, and how much (low in the form of high. Going low in order to get high) one is willing to say yes to. The road to fame is made up of assent. This is what gets you to the literal and figurative top. And this is why fame is almost always a parable about losing (not finding one’s way). About being led astray. “Making it” is not the struggle to become, as it’s always been said, but the willingness to be made.
– Masha Tupitsyn, Becoming Object



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