“You have to be crazy to see things so lucidly, so all at once. If you’re great you can stay that way and people will believe in you, swear by you, turn the world upside down for you. But if you’re only partly great, or just a nobody, then what happens to you is lost.”
“Thus, whatever it is that I choose to regard as my story is lost, drowned, indissolubly fused with the lives, the drama, the stories of others.”
“When each thing is lived through to the end there is no death and no regrets, neither is there a false springtime; each moment lived pushes open a greater, wider horizon from which there is no escape save living.”
“In the street you learn what human beings really are; otherwise, or afterwards, you invent them. What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.”
“No one is allowed to smoke in my house. Sometimes I do, and I dont even smoke. I just do it to rebel against my own rules.”
“But then it is our peculiar fate to destroy or change all things we touch since [...] we are the constant and compulsive killers of life, the mad dogs of creation, and our triumphant viral progress can only end in a burst of cleansing solar fire, either simulated by us or thrust upon us by [...]
“… and what, finally, are human relations but the desire in each of us to exercise absolute power over others?”