It’s a uniquely American prudishness. You can write the most detailed, vivid description of an ax entering a skull, and nobody will say a word in protest. But if you write a similarly detailed description of a penis entering a vagina, you get letters from people saying they’ll never read you again. What the hell? Penises entering vaginas bring a lot more joy into the world than axes entering skulls.
— Author George R. R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire.) Interview published in May 2012 Rolling Stones Magazine. (via sweetupndown9)(via lassetts)
There are thousands of paths. They all lead nowhere. You must ask yourself one question: ‘Does this path have a heart?’ If it does, the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use.
— Don Juan
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people want you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.
— Anne Lamott
Let me tell you, in my home I am a household name.
— Paula Poundstone, interviewed on WTF with Marc Maron
People say, “Oh, Mr. Sendak, I wish I were in touch with my childhood self, like you!” As if it were all quaint and succulent, like Peter Pan. Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!
I say, “You are in touch, lady — you’re mean to your kids, you treat your husband like shit, you lie, you’re selfish… that IS your childhood self!”
In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It’s vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my own childhood vividly. I knew terrible things, but I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew.
It would scare them.
— Maurice Sendak, in conversation with Art Spiegelman in the New Yorker from 1993
If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.
— James MacNeill Whistler
Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.
— Timothy Leary
Simply because anyone can buy a camera, shutter away, and then with a slightly prejudiced eye justify the product does not validate the achievement. Shooting a target with a rifle is accomplished with similar speed and yet… no one ever suggests that marksmanship is easy.
— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (via gunstreet)
I even like Starbucks. I know, I know, they’re the great Satan of coffee, but when you’re stranded in an airport in Akron, Ohio and you see a Starbucks across the concourse… rainbows appear, you’re running through a wheatfield in slow motion…
—Will Durst
Or if you’re working through the better part of 4000 feet of rope in the course of a day, yeah. There’s the preference for and loyalty to your favorite coffee shop and then there’s the fact that a Starbucks is a couple blocks away and holy shit you want coffee NOW!!!!!
*ahem*
Y’know, babies aren’t afraid of leaving their cribs. They clamber over the fuckers like hump-maddened gibbons detecting a scent of estrus-swollen arse on the breeze. So why the hell are we so afraid of leaving the 20th century?
— Warren Ellis
