Here’s my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I’ve ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.
The truth hurts because it’s real. It hurts because it mattered. And that’s an important thing to acknowledge to yourself.
A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer.
I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself to train my body for real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.
The future will erase everything – there’s no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.
Sunlight feels warm and rough against your skin like a kiss on the cheek from your dad.
You could hold me and I could hold you. And it would be so peaceful. Completely peaceful. Like the feeling of sleep, but awake in it together.
I hadn’t read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.
It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.
Somehow the revolutionaries must approach the workers because the workers won’t approach them. But it’s difficult to know where to start; we’ve all got a finger in the dam. The problem for me is that as I have become more real, I’ve grown away from most working-class people.
There were very few real folk singers you know, though I liked Dominic Behan a bit and there was some good stuff to be heard in Liverpool. Just occasionally you hear very old records on the radio or TV of real workers in Ireland or somewhere singing these songs and the power of them is fantastic.
The more reality we face, the more we realise that unreality is the main programme of the day. The more real we become, the more abuse we take, so it does radicalise us in a way, like being put in a corner. But it would be better if there were more of us.
It’s pretty hard when you are Caesar and everyone is saying how wonderful you are and they are giving you all the goodies and the girls, it’s pretty hard to break out of that, to say ‘Well, I don’t want to be king, I want to be real.’
You’re only awake when you realise you’re awake and when you’re dreaming, it is just as real, whatever happens is just as real – whether you actually do die in a dream or fulfil whatever you’re doing in a dream, it’s, there’s nobody to tell me it isn’t as real as this now, because how do you know?
It was my Fat Elvis period. I was eating and drinking like a pig. I was depressed and I was crying out for help. It’s real. And I meant it.
In ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ I was visualizing Alice in Wonderland, an image of this female who would come and save me – a girl with kaleidoscope eyes who would be the real love of my life. Lucy turned out to be Yoko.
I used to hide my real emotions in gobbledegook, like in In His Own Write. When I wrote teenage poems, I wrote in gobbledegook because I was always hiding my real emotions from Mimi.
Well, I don’t want to be king, I want to be real.
Nobody is a real loser-until they start blaming somebody else.
Real wealth comes to the person who learns that we are paid best for the things we do for nothing.