Everyone is equal and everyone is forced to participate; you can’t just be a spectator.
Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.
For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn’t such a great skill to have.
That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can’t control life, at least you can control your version.
I’m fascinated by the whole issue of arousal addiction, which seems to be mostly a problem for young men.
Your past is just a story. And once you realize this it has no power over you.
If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?
We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
Don’t write about your most emotionally charged moment as a learning thing.
The more things you own, the more they own you.
We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics.
Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.
Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.
You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.
What we don’t understand we can make mean anything.
I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That’s the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.
My life has been about living like a monk and looking like a priest so that people will come up to me and tell me their most appalling stories. They have to make their confession to somebody, and it might as well be me.
People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.
The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly.
There’s a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.