Bug Jack Barron Quotes

“Stay a dreamer, and you'll never have your dream; get down in the nitty-gritty, and when you get your dream you see what horseshit it was in the first place.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“It ain't power that corrupts, it's the changes you put your head through getting it.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“Kiss me, and you'll live forever. You'll be a frog, but you'll live forever.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“At least as coherent as the Gettysburg Address backwards in Albanian, anyway.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“Who was really the cop-out, Jack who went and got what he needed to make his dream real, molding a Jack Barron reality to the shape of his dreams, or me, shaping dreams to the size of mundane reality”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“[P]ower, terrible, unprecedented power, and with it came the unavoidable choice that had faced every power-junkie since time began: to have the sheer gall to fake being something greater than a man, or cop-out on the millions who had poured a part of themselves into your image and be something less.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“Yeah, there’s a real surge in seeing people with your name pinned on ‘em hanging on your words, real big charge, but it’s never enough, you gotta have more and more and more and that power-monkey gets bigger and bigger till there’s nothing left of you. And you forget why you got started in the first place. You stop caring, stop feeling, stop really trying to help people, start using ‘em... I’ll take show biz over politics any time—nice white-collar job keeps your hands clean.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“I’ll do you a show, Howards, you’ll never believe. I’ll chop you to pieces, and be alive and immortal when you’re nothing but a lingering bad taste in a hundred million mouths, fried to a crisp in the electric chair, you Frankenstein axe-murderer you!”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“Dig: four cats in a smoke-filled room with star of television and groin-kneeing Jack Barron got the power to run me for President they say the word and Bennie Howards can buy the whole lot of ‘em out of petty cash, and he’s nothing but a prick with five hundred billion dollars I can think immelmanns around with my head tied behind my back. Thing is, it’s all show biz, is all, politics is nothing more than show biz with no class, and these high-powered vips are men just like me, only a little dumber.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“Immortality—was electric-light slime reaching for the stars, and she stood poised on the brink, balanced on the razor-edge between life and death, the flickering and the eternal, the human and the immortal, sanity and the holy madness that was realer than sanity, more cogent, a path to oneness with the timeless infinite that could be hers if she had the courage to cast off her moorings to the shores of self and trust her fate to that all-forgiving sea.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“Staring into the naked orange flames of the firepit, naked flesh, naked Carrie Donaldson on the bare rug in exhausted, sated semi-sleep beside him, Jack Barron felt a carapace of image-history-skin encysting him like steel walls of a TV set, a creature imprisoned in the electronic circuitry of his own head perceiving through promptboard vidphone fleshless electronic speed of light ersatz senses, separated from the girl beside him by the phosphor-dot impenetrable glass TV screen Great Wall of China of his own image.
First time I remember being blown feeling like wet put-down ugliness, he brooded. Ugly, he told himself, is a thing you feel — truth is ugly when it's a weapon, lie is beautiful when an act of love ugly when it's one-sided fuck is beautiful when it's simple, mutual, nobullshit balling, ugly when chick gets her kicks off you that really isn't there, is why you feel like a rotten lump of shit, man. Getting blown Sara go down being dug by woman's a pure gas; being sucked off, image-statue living lie, someone else's lie being eaten (Let me eat you, let me eat you, baby!) is a dirty act of plastic cannibalism, her dirtiness, not mine.
Whole world's full of plastic cannibals feeding their own little bags off meals of my goddamned image-flesh, eating Jack Barron ghost that isn't there. And now Morris and my so-called friend Luke are hot to package my living-color bod into TV dinners, sell to hundred million viewer-voter cannibals for thirty pieces of power silver.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“I'm not stoned now, Jack,' she said quietly. 'I'm straight, maybe straighter than I've ever been in my life. We all go through changes. I watched you go through yours, and I couldn't take it. Now I think I've gone through one of my own, a big one. It happens like that sometimes, six years of things just happening to you but not really getting through to your head, and then something, acid plus something, maybe something silly and meaningless triggers the big flash, and suddenly all those six years come through all the way at once and you feel them, feel the years before too, and all the possible futures, all in a moment, and nothing's happened in that moment that anyone else can see, but you're just not the same you anymore. There's a gap, a discontinuity, and you know you can't go back to being what you've been but you don't yet know what you are.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“She kissed him quick but deep with her tongue; bubbling over, she pulled away from his mouth, still in an arm-on-shoulders mutual embrace, said: 'Jack, Jack I watched you on television, I mean really watched you, really saw for the very first time what you were doing. You were magnificent, you were everything I always knew you would be the first day I met you in Berkeley, but better — better than anything I could've imagined—because then I was a girl, and you were a boy, and today you were a man, and I... Well, maybe at the advanced age of thirty-five I'm leaving adolescence and I'm ready to try loving you the way a woman should love a man.'
'That's... uh... groovy,' he said, and now she thrilled even at the way he was preoccupied, the old Berkeley distant-focus preoccupation, thinking through her, above her, warm exciting man-thoughts enveloping her in him were the moments she had always loved him most.
'Groovy, and I dig what you're saying — I mean about us. But the show... look, Sara, there are things I've got to tell you. I mean, don't think I'm back in the silly old Baby Bolshevik bag. I suppose it looked that way to a lot of people, and there were moments when I... but I don't do things without a reason, and there are things going on that—'
'I know, Jack,' she said. 'You don't even have to tell me. It stands out all over you. You're involved in something big, something important, the kind of thing you were always meant to do. Something real like you used to — '
'It's not what you think, not what anyone thinks,' he muttered, brows furrowed at some hidden contrapuntal train of thought. 'I don't even know the whole story myself. But I feel something, can smell it... something so big, so... I'm afraid to even think about it until I —”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron