You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.
I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It’s not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us – these are just the hazards of being free.
I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
Dostoevski informs everybody; or he ought to.
It’s all very confusing. I think I’m very honest and candid, but I’m also proud of how honest and candid I am – so where does that put me?
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
Mediocrity is contextual.
The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, ‘then’ what do we do?
My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.
We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.
I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.
A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.
What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?
The man who knows his limitations, has none.
I’m not afraid of new things. I’m just afraid of feeling alone even when there’s somebody else there. I’m afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that’s selfish, but it’s the way I feel.
We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.