I’m screaming for help and everybody’s acting as if I’m singing Ethel Merman covers...
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this.
Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...
And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer’s heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.
I am not what you see and hear. -Hal.
Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T true is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it.
One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
What TV is extremely good at – and realize that this is ‘all it does’ – is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
Capital T-truth is about life before death.
Does somebody have an explanation why there’s human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire’s still going.
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.
So, yo, then, man, what’s your story?
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
I find in myself a need to get very away.