This pain is comfort. It is the solace of physicality, like a touch.
Doing nothing was as honourable as any available course of action. Think of Hamlet, think of Job, think of Jesus before Pilate.
Like all fiction, my lies are just my efforts to be truer than the truth.
I stare out at the real world projected on the windows
Reality, it seems, is not a flat plane, but has as many veils as an onion has skins.
For someone to be perfect, they must be real, however imperfect they are.
It is a matter of mere coincidence that there is often a real individual who corresponds with a celebrity, signifies them.
You need to bridge the gap between reality and freedom. Drugs are the bridge.
I feel underslept but overjoyed. Nothing feels so good as this.
Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?
I know everything must be a lie, but I believe it anyway.
Is it murder to kill a man if the man never existed? To the man it is.
Job understood that he was nothing more than God’s invention and so too was his suffering
Suffering is inevitable. It is part of the human condition. It is written in the human script.
I may not be free, but I’m not about to surrender the illusion of choice.
An unpublished writer should doubt themselves. They should constantly wonder whether what they’re creating has merit. And then, having doubted, they should take up their pen and see if they can’t make it better.
All life is preoccupied with death. Death is the only certain future. Yet in the face of reason, everyone holds out hope for the highly improbable.
Because he believed in himself, he believed what he did was important. Or maybe it was the other way around.
Publishers are businesses and I don’t blame them for that. If they didn’t make money by publishing books, there wouldn’t be any books.
A novel must be judged on its merits, not on how hard the journey was to write it.
Who can say they saw a whole play or read a whole book? Each has their own experience, their own play, their own book
Grief denied will surface in borrowed clothes, the mad, sad clothes of paranoia, fear or loneliness
In the chain of events, it is arbitrary to be sentimental about the passing of any one link.
Time passes. I drift in and out. As if I cease to be, until I remember to exist again.
To reread a book is to read a different book. The reader is different. The meaning is different.
Inhumanity is part of humanity as much as suffering is a part of stories. Cruelty is written in the human script.
To be mad is worse than not to be if this is what it is.
To be motivated to write a novel, I need to be unable not to write.
Good writing is more about graft and craft than inspiration and aspiration.
He did it because he could not help himself, which explains everything and nothing
The bacteria of resentment bred: distance turned to distrust; distrust turned to bitterness; bitterness to hate, which is, after all, a kind of grievous love
Is cruelty still cruel if it is necessary? Is cruelty still cruel if it is part of a lie?
These are the things you don’t say, even to someone you love.
The silence was pregnant with noise, with muted fury, with questions the father found too disgusting to frame and with answers to which the son was incapable of giving voice.
The only simple truth is that there is nothing simple in this complex universe. Everything relates. Everything connects
Wouldn’t a no one do as well as a someone about whom nothing can be said?
Being gay is not just what I do, but who I am. It is part of how I choose to live my life even if I never chose.
Even when I press against him his presence is too far away.
A thrilling story can be dull if told badly, but even the most mundane event can be elevated into a tale of epic scale by a good storyteller.
Nothing is over our heads if we hold them high enough.
As thoroughly as mankind has killed God, the reader has despatched the author.
Adam & Eve have been degraded, reduplicated forever, photocopies of photocopies, mistakes copied, magnified, augmented.
I’ve often been criticised, but never critically wounded
He’s a typical existentialist. And that’s a contradiction in terms if ever there was one.
Genes do not make an individual homosexual. They play their part, but so does the rest of the universe.
I guarantee it will change your life, but only because everything does, however small.
Sometimes a butterfly flaps its wings and the weather turns out fine.
To lose one parent might be considered a misfortune, or a reason to deny God’s existence at the least. To lose two looks like He may be up to something.
He showed videotape of himself committing acts of self-violence and informing news crews that he had been assaulted by a marauding mob of irate art historians.
There’s no such thing as probability,” she says, slowly, with minimal movement of her jaw. “Things turn out the way they do.
Actors,” he says, “should only be superficial on the surface.