Timothy Morton

“A job letter, an interview - even a writing sample - have far less to do with intellect and far more to do with aesthetics than you think.”

“The present is haunted by the X-present. I call this manifold of present and X-present 'nowness': a shifting, haunted region like evaporating mist; a region can't be tied to a specific timescale.”

“Bohm's 'ontological interpretation' was so called because of the bad rap the word 'ontology' has had in our correlationist age. As a bit of a put-down.”

“Spending some money on the you who is going to get a job is essential.”

“It's easier to be Eric Idle than to be Paul McCartney.”

“I like being irritating.”

“Being seen means that your being is held by the other person without comment, without praise or blame or indifference - just with some kind of open care.”

“When you make or study art, you are not exploring some kind of candy on the surface of a machine. You are making or studying causality.”

“Symbiosis can fail in various different ways: if there's too much stomach bacteria in my stomach, I might have some problems. If there's too little, I might have some problems. There's a sort of dynamic system there.”

“If you've read 'Dark Ecology,' you'll know there's a whole thing about cats in it, more than once.”

“I used to keep a folder with all my rejection letters in it - a few years into having a job, I burned it.”

“I grew up in a haunting postindustrial landscape where prehistoric ferns grew among tens of railway tracks surmounted by brilliant arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night, because for them, it was day.”

“Losing a fantasy is much harder than losing a reality.”

“I'm not unhappy with the idea of appealing to people's self-interest if that's what makes them understand something about the non-human world.”

“Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children.”

“An environment is precisely something one is unable to point to yet is strangely there nonetheless.”

“Invoking Nature always measures the distance we have yet to travel to achieve real progress on environmental issues.”

“When I make music, I often sound better singing as a woman, go figure, so I like to tweak the format and pitch and suchlike of my recorded voice. Sounds better.”

“Does anyone recall hippies designing things for Generation X? Does anyone recall the elegance of that? How design was about making things simpler?”

“American voting districts are, across a lot of the country, deeply messed up by having been gerrymandered by right-wing politicians.”