“California's like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me.”

"Los Angeles", p. 159
Exhumations (1966)
Context: California is a tragic country — like Palestine, like every Promised Land. Its short history is a fever-chart of migrations — the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories — followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving sorrowfully homeward.

Charlie Thompson, an award-winning television producer who investigated Safir for ABC's 20/20
[Russ Baker and Josh Benson, http://www.observer.com/1999/commish-bites-back-howard-safir-explains-his-life-his-critics, The Commish Bites Back: Howard Safir Explains His Life to His Critics, The New York Observer, 1999-05-16, 2007-12-20]
About

Strange Horizons interview (2004)
Context: I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders. They fall somewhere on the spectrum of being bipolar, of being borderline autistic and so on. These things are there. Now of course these days you can go to college and when you come out you are a professional artist and you can run a gallery as a business and have a career. That is a very valid way for an artist to make a living. But it doesn't make for a very interesting story. It doesn't have a lot of mythic subtext. … For me a lot of the world really is like that. The scenes in my book that people describe as "such a hallucinatory sequence" … I don't see the world like that all the time, but I see the world like that a lot.
So what am I going to do about that? Am I going to go crazy? Am I going to institutionalize myself? Am I going to go and work in a cubicle as a telemarketer so that I don't give vent to that? Or am I going to take that and channel it into my work? It is a gift.

Source: Cold Days

Vol. 2, Ch. 22, § 261
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims
Context: Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another's flesh; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thinking of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. This is the fundamental difference between the thinker and the mere man of learning. The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.

The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus (1949), Chapter 14. (New York: Grove Press, c1965, p. 339)

À vous il faut la vie naturelle, à moi la vie factice.
Degas, quoted by George Moore, Impressions and Opinions (1891)
These words were spoken, Moore states, to 'a landscape painter'
1876 - 1895

Source: Playing with Fire

Source: City of Ashes