“At 4:00 A.M. on May 5, 1992, the shareware episode of Wolfenstein 3D was complete.”

“All they needed was a title. Carmack had the idea. It was taken from The Color of Money, the 1986 Martin Scorsese film in which Tom Cruise played a brash young pool hustler. In one scene Cruise saunters into a billiards hall carrying his favorite pool cue in a stealth black case. “What you got in there?” another player asks. Cruise smiles devilishly, because he knows what fate he is about to spring upon this player, just as, Carmack thought, id had once sprung upon Softdisk and as, with this next game, they might spring upon the world. “In here?” Cruise replies, flipping open the case. “Doom.”

“If we can get this done, [Doom] is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history!”

“Opium is the perfect drug for people who want to remain articulate while being completely trivial.”

“Fabulous. If you possess it, you don’t need to ask what it is. When you attempt to delineate it, you move away from it. Fabulous is one of those words that provide a measure of the degree to which a person or event manifests a particular oppressed subculture’s most distinctive, invigorating features. What are the salient features of fabulousness? Irony. Tragic History. Defiance. Gender-fuck. Glitter. Drama. It is not butch. It is not hot. The cathexis surrounding fabulousness is not necessarily erotic. The fabulous is not delineated by age or beauty. It is raw materials reworked into illusion. To be truly fabulous, one must completely triumph over tragedy, age, and physical insufficiencies. The fabulous is the rapturous embrace of difference, the discovering of self not in that which has rejected you but in that which makes you unlike, the dislike, the other.”

“MATAMORE: I never fight with my love face on, I worry that it might get scratched.”

“I never really feel that I’m stuck. I actually think that people are never stuck, there’s no such thing as writers block, I think that theres terror that can silence you. But if you can think of it as a dynamic thing I mean a writers block, it’s a paralysis an immobility and the thing that has immobilized you is a very powerful force. Immobility is itself an act, it’s a choice. It can sometimes take as much energy to remain immobile as it does to be mobile. And if you think of it in a dynamic way then it’d freeze you from the sense that at some point your talent will simply abandon you and you’re just a vacant shell with nothing to say, I don’t think that ever really happens. But I think that terror, bad experience, trauma and so on can absolutely silence you.”