He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

Who are we to say getting incested or abused or violated or any of those things can’t have their positive aspects in the long run? … You have to be careful of taking a knee-jerk...

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?

Its emotional character … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency —sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping...

It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We’ve changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being...

The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion.

An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the...

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red.

the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental...

It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their...

I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I’ve seen genius shining off the guy.

For me, art that’s alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.

If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic...

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what...

I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch’s Laura’s muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that...

Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It’s like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do....

People hate people, not freedom.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems...

Maybe it’s the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on...

Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian.

Weight Watchers holds as a descriptive axiom the transparently true fact that for each of us the universe is deeply and sharply and completely divided into for example in my case, me, on one side,...

What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.

Um um um um um. This business of—this business about marketing yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless we’re allowed to think that that’s—that that’s it. That that’s the point, that that’s the goal, you...

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits...

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood’s end.

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a...

You might consider how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.

The Moms revealed that if you’re not crazy then speaking to someone who isn’t there is termed apostrophe and is valid art.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.1010 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize...

I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I’m not one of the self-hating ones. The type of like “I’m shit and the world’d be better off without poor me” type that says...

Suppose I were to give you a key ring […] with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we’re imagining opening in onto...

And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this “both” shit. “Both” comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. … But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked...

I think it’s easy to stop smoking; it’s just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.

Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as – and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be – lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of...

Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for...

You get to decide what to worship.

The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of...

What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to...

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

Credo di sembrare un tipo normale, forse persino simpatico, anche se mi hanno consigliato di apparire il più normale possibile, e di non provare nemmeno a fare quella che a me parrebbe un’espressione simpatica o...

For me, boviscopophobia (=the morbid fear of being seen as bovine) is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we’re in port.

Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

A question, doctor,” he said. “Why doesn’t the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapults and radioactive road runner food pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese?” He smiled...