“I have to get to the other side of the animal”

“I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.”

“When I feel nothing for a person I get scared I'm losing my humanity and that turning cold means my heart's been botoxed; we're all fucked.”

“You have got to goad yourself toward a becoming that is in accordance with what you are innate. You have got to sometimes become the medicine you want to take.”

“Shit is disgusting and horrible. A lot of people and things are disgusting and horrible, and I want to be a nice person, and I am. When you are speaking about rejected people whose suffering makes them disgusting, you are speaking about shit. I do not mean that we should all eat shit and love what we can’t help rejecting. I am saying that I tried to do that, just to see if it was possible.It’s not possible. ”

“And your ex, or maybe you're back with herI don't know, Emma. I read some of what she wroteTo you when I broke into your gmail account.She's charming. A little shallow maybe”

“Maybe what made me cry in class was how tired I was and how sad and hard it is, and how rare, to undertake an act that's truly free, and not just a response to a confused surge of drives and fears.”