Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?
I tossici non hanno relazioni, prendono ostaggi.
It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.
If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.
Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most “familiarity” is meditated and delusive.
What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves. They’re entirely themselves, they’ve got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
I’d like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.