Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out.
I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mind crushing. It is soul deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing. It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing.
Perhaps once we might be able to sneak a death past him. Immortal, yes, but not indestructible. I saw that when AM withdrew from my mind, and allowed me the exquisite ugliness of returning to consciousness with the feeling of that burning neon pillar still rammed deep into the soft gray brain matter. He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you. And added, brightly, but then you’re there, aren’t you.
The explanations a writer gives himself for having written any particular book are more often not the real reasons why that book has been written. Honesty is not the issue. Understanding is. A man does not write one novel at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. He is on a journey and he is reporting in: ‘This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.’” The.
I never met a man I didn’t like. I don’t go out much.
I mean, what do you do, when you find that things are not what you were taught they’re supposed to be? What do you do with the desperation that boils up from your stomach when you know there’s a road out there with your destination at the end of it, but it’s too damned dark to even find the road? You turn and turn and turn around like a dog trying to escape. Shrieks in the cavity of your head that so urgently needs to be filled with facts and challenges.
They are stories I wrote because my friends are gone, a lot of them, and if you can’t be angry about it, how the hell much did you care to begin with?
I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure.
Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory.
Each of us moves through life shadowed by childhood memories. We never forget. We are bent and shaped and changed by those ancient fears and hatreds. They are the mortal dreads that in a million small ways block us off or drive us toward our destiny.
We talked across each other, our conversation at right angles, only meeting in the intersections of silence at story’s end.
Who among us can deny that within every adult is caged a frightened child?
There are certain injustices in this life you’ve got to do something about. You can’t just say that you can’t fight it, or it’s too much trouble, or that you don’t have the time or the effort, or that you can’t win. Forget all that. Fight them all!
Style, like taste, is resistant to lucid definition; however, both, as living things should be, are subject to constant change.
Too many of our insanities are tolerated because they are harmless on an individual level – but multiply them by a millionfold and you have a nation that is culturally sick. These things stem from each individual’s conception of himself – which he arbitrarily assumes to be the nature of the world as well. These conceptions are haphazardly picked up during youth – along with all of the other opinions, neuroses, hangups and etceteras common to the human animal.
He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you. And added, brightly, but then you’re there, aren’t you. The.
Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them.
I know that my true friend will appear after my death, and my sweetheart died before I was born.
The solitary creator, dreaming his or her dream, unaided, seems to me to be the only artist we can trust.
Ellison’s Theorem: the further right your position, the less telling your satire. A corollary of which is that you can’t lampoon anywhere near where you stand, because you’d annihilate your own troops.