“A cat for a hat, or a hat for a cat. But nothing for nothing.”

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: What I would prefer to have is to have a kind of magic where we say, "OK, we’re going to do a magical performance on this night, at this time. You come along, if you don’t think it’s magical, that’s fine. We’ll show you. We’ll show you what we mean, and you judge for yourself." That’s only fair. So a lot of the magic we do tends to gravitate toward the practical end, toward something that is tangible. Where you’ve got a record at the end of it, a performance at the end of it, a painting at the end of it. You’ve conjured some energy, some idea, some information from somewhere and put it in a tangible form. You conjure something into existence in a literal sense. A rabbit out of a hat. Something out of nothing. That’s one level to it, but there’s a lot of background to that. That’s the stuff that people see, that’s the end result of the process. But we also do a lot of ritual work purely on our own.

Je ne puis rien nommer si ce n'est par son nom ;
J'appelle un chat un chat, et Rollet un fripon.
Satire I, l. 51
Satires (1716)

Modern Manners (1983)

Source: Sirius (1944), Chapter VIII Sirius at Cambridge.

Source: Difficulties with Girls (1988), Ch. 19, p. 274

Carry on Tradition
On Albums, Hip Hop Is Dead (2006)

Source: Thoreau Journal 9

pg. 71
Faster than the Speed of Light

Source: Venus in Furs