When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?
Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.
You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
The money is in television. Books are not the dominant medium of our time, so fewer people will create them. In a sad way, books have become a form of “comfort food” we expect to lull us to sleep.
What they don’t teach you in art school is how your whole life is about discovering who you already were.
What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.
What I’m always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces – the ghost stories that engaged us.
Real writers write because they love to write. They don’t write for public acclaim.
If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.
The answer is there is no answer.
With the novels, I usually start from something in my own life that I can’t resolve, so I turn it into a metaphor and for months or sometimes years I’ll exhaust all of my emotional reaction to this issue by making it enormous on the page.
Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It’s because they know what it’s like to be treated like an animal.
The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.
You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.
I think standardization is really the first step to something being commodified.
Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.
Parents are like God because you wanna know they’re out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.