No one I interact with – except maybe for family and strangers at the Russian baths and other weird places I may go to – is just friends or lovers with me: they also know something of my writing and this distorts their take on me.
I’ve always been intrigued by Stockholm Syndrome. Reminds me of my childhood.
How terrible to be alcoholic. You just want to quietly soothe and maybe poison yourself, but you end up poisoning those around you as well, like trying to commit suicide with a gas oven and unwittingly murdering your neighbors.
I don’t really know the person who wrote the things I wrote. I kind of know him, but I change so much all the time that it’s like I start fresh over and over and over and over. Writing-wise and life-wise.
I am always the source of the worst rumors about myself.
Having a show get canceled is like, ‘Oh, you have caviar between your teeth,’ you know what I mean? Because you had a show in the first place.
For me, the past is dead. Can’t go back.
As a child, I wanted to be an athlete, a professional tennis player or something like that.
A lot of writing is a form of seeing – putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.
To write about a place, you have to live there.
Mostly I have to try to censor myself so as not to write things that will hurt other people, or that will go too far.
Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way.
The work changes the way your face changes and ages – it just does. Also, I have very little connection to anything I’ve written. I move on. We all move on.
He was aware that he was not completely sane, so he kept himself in rigid check, playing both jailer and prisoner.
I felt myself falling asleep; my eyes were closing, and then I thought, Maybe I should just kill myself. Suicidal thoughts always sneak up on me like that. But I don’t mind them. They’re like aspirin. They calm me down.
Joe knew that all human beings are the star of their own very important film, a film in which they are both camera and actor; a film in which they are always playing the fearful and lonely hero who gets up each day hoping to finally strike upon the life they are meant to lead, though they never do.
There was a naughty grin on her face and she said, “Wait. You’ll get an erection and then what will I do?
I’m kind of an upbeat Hamlet.
My Caprice was a spacious cruiser, well insulated from the world – one motored along the highways as if sitting in a middle-class living room equipped with an engine and tires.
As I followed Mr. Harrison, I picked up his salty, sweet odor – it pervaded the whole apartment actually – and I liked it. It smelled alive.
I was deeply depressed. I felt my brain slipping out of its casing and down my neck, like an egg sliding on a frying pan. So.