If you’re standing in the middle of a ring and you’re playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that’s real.
The fact that somebody’s telling you a story about people who didn’t exist doesn’t make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind.
Kayfabe is kind of a code. To break kayfabe is to let people know that the punch was not real and that the match was scripted.
Not everybody relates to pain, but if you can watch other people playacting it, you can absorb some of that vibe. It’s like watching horror movies – you want to have the experience, but in a safe environment.
In wrestling, people just throw each other around, possibly actually bleed, and are still friends in the locker room afterwards. But there’s a real glee – a feeling goes up in the arena, especially on non-TV days. If it’s just people in a room and somebody starts to bleed, that’s very exciting.
I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.
There’s this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that.
I’m so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.
If my songs are being listened to between any other songs, that is awesome, and I’m glad people are getting something out of them.
If you get into a fight and somebody punches you, you get two feelings. One: That really hurts. Two: That relief in the realness of, like, Wow, this is what it is. It’s not an intellectual process.
When I was kid, they always used to tell me to keep notebooks. I look at my shelves now and it’s just nothing but notebooks. And if I haven’t gotten an idea but I have time to work, I’ll pull one out and I bet there will be five or six sentences that will kick me off.
I am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea – I put other things aside.
As an artist, you always have to be growing. You don’t just want to do what you already know people like.
Literature is a mystical place for me. It’s not dry. It’s where miracles happen.
Human beings are selfish by nature. Everything that happens to a child, you immediately grab your own child and say, “I will never let that happen to you.”
I didn’t feel like I’d really won anything, but I had come through the day no worse off than I’d come into it, which, as I have been telling myself for many years now, is a victory whether it feels like one or not.
It isn’t really much of a mystery, this occasional need I have to comfort my father. I did something terrible to his son once.
Not everybody wants to get out and see the world. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you just want to figure out how to fit yourself into the world you already know.
In video games you sometimes run into what they call a side quest, and if you don’t manage to figure it out you can usually just go back into the normal world of the game and continue on toward your objective. I felt like I couldn’t find my way back to the world now: like I was somebody locked in a meaningless side quest, in a stuck screen.
People trying to help you when you’re past help are raw and helpless. Nobody wins: you get nothing; they feel worse.