When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.
It’s June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.
In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.
Dismantling the architecture of my discontent.
In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life.
To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.
Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.
The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.
Most people are participating in the grand adventure of living with one another.
We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
To leave the world a little better than you found it. That’s the best a man can ever do.
It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.
It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.
As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.
He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.
Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
The tone of every book is slightly different; there’s a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.