Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack.
I suppose we’ll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, “I did it because I’m a dirty dog.” This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, “I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one.
Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they’re honest about everything.
If rain is God crying, I think God is drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus.
Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.
We are losing the ability to understand anything that’s even vaguely complex.
We’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.
…because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation. It’s a way for people to be honest without telling the truth.
Sometimes I fantasize about the US head of state as a super-lazy, super-moral libertarian despot and think, “That would certainly make everything easier,” even though I can’t think of one person who’d qualify, except maybe Willie Nelson.
When exactly did every housewife in America become a whore?
TV takes away our freedom to have whatever thoughts we want. So do photographs, movies, and the Internet. They provide us with more intellectual stimuli, but they construct a lower, harder ceiling.
It’s nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it’s the weirdos who care the most.
History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different.
I love the way music inside a car makes you feel invisible; if you play the stereo at max volume, it’s almost like the other people can’t see into your vehicle. It tints your windows, somehow.
If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.
It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn.
Record sales don’t matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone.
It is impossible to examine questions we refuse to ask.
And I’m probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.
The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true–both objectively and subjectively–is habitually provisional.
And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the statue quo is temporary.
The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.
And if something is only itself, it doesn’t particularly matter.
It’s difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.
Hitler is the human catch-all for all other terrible humans.
We are always dying, all the time. That’s what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.
…I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as “the sport of the future” since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.
… the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.
…but the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.
The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is midly zen. There are public road signs that say “Gusty Winds May Exist”. This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice.
The desire to be cool is—ultimately—the desire to be rescued.
Sarcasm is when you tell someone the truth by lying on purpose.
We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it’s too weird to imagine people who aren’t casually lying, pretty much all the time.
Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary.
If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?
The first moment someone calls for a revolution is usually the last moment I take them seriously.
Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture.
Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy.
Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect.
People will look at the world without seeing anything beyond their unconscious expectation.
However, I suppose VH1 *is* selling me something; they’re selling nostalgia, which means they’re selling my own memories back to me, which means they’re selling me to me.
Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we flow with time (like a twig floating on the surface of the water).
…his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.
The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no ‘normal’ because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.
I care about strangers when they’re abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they’re literally in front of me.
Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.
Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.
I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they’re all so envious of it.
It”s easier to believe there’s a monster under the bed if you’ve spent the last six months arguing with a monster.
And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.