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.
Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses – places where statements that seem to obey all the language’s rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.
I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I’d come to see as my co-conspirator.
Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
Kafka’s evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.