Quotes on Carnivals

Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills.

Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.

The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar "queen", alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.

A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.

I am like a caricature of myself, and I like that. It is like a mask. And for me the Carnival of Venice lasts all year long.

Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.

Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.