Monsters

The genius dominates, but he has another face, too: he’s also a servant. A servant to what? Well, to his own genius.

That is: Love is not reliant on judgment, but on a decision to set judgment aside. Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don’t love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason.

I guess all of this is a long way of saying: monsters are just people. I don’t think I would’ve been able to accept the humanity of monsters if I hadn’t been a drunk and if I hadn’t quit.

“The problem is that the model of individual responsibility assumed by most versions of ethics” can have “little purchase on the behavior of Capital or corporations.”

When someone says we ought to separate the art from the artist, they’re saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that’s not how stains work.

The woman’s emotion: resentment against injustice, an impersonal poison. The unlucky ones, who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men. The lucky ones like me—fight it.

Recovery, as a way of living, makes you see things from the monster’s point of view.

But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people.

Our feelings seem—they feel—sovereign, but they’re tethered to our moment and our circumstance; and the moments and past circumstances that came before.