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“To write is to preside at judgment day over one’s self.”

  • John Madera

    • “One’s life is a heavy price to pay for being born.”

    “He who possesses liberty otherwise than as an aspiration possesses it soulless, dead. One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding.”

    “Away with the State! I will take part in that revolution. Undermine the whole conception of a State, declare free choice and spiritual kinship to be the only all-important conditions of any union, and you will have the commencement of a liberty that is worth something.”

    “The State has its root in time, and will ripe and rot in time.”

    “Now this very contentedness in the possession of a dead liberty is a characteristic of the so-called state; and it is worthless.”

    To live is to battle the demons
    in the heart as well as the brain.
    To write is to preside at
    judgment day over one’s self.

    “I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.”

    “The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions—to destroy.”

    “The majority has the might—more’s the pity—but it hasn’t right. I am right—I and one or two other individuals like me. The minority is always right.”

    “I don’t imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.”

    “Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness.”

    “A man who has the inventive genius can’t control it exactly as he wishes. Its working depends in great measure on inspiration—on a momentary suggestion—and it is almost impossible to tell beforehand at what moment it will come.”

    “Live, work, act. Don’t sit here and brood and grope among insoluble enigmas.”

     

    • John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024) and Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming in 2026).  His  fiction is also published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, Hobart, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His poetry is also published in elimae, Sixth Finch, Contrapuntos, and elsewhere. His criticism is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, two-time New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.

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