Monsters

What do we do about the terrible people we love? That question comes with another question nestled inside it: how awful can we be, before people stop loving us?

we ourselves yearn for plot and action. We yearn for events! And then we are furious when this eventful asshole commits a crime.

Every year we are on the internet, we grow more enmeshed with public figures.

Nabokov is in fact a kind of anti-monster. He was willing to have the world think the worst of him. By doing so—by telling the worst story, and letting himself be implicated in that story—he created a way for us to understand, to feel, the enormity of what it is to steal a childhood.

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

The genius is the one who is able to exert control over his materials and his helpers while simultaneously absolutely losing control over himself. He is masterful at performing a servitude to something greater than himself.

Because, out in front of all of that, I’m a human. And I don’t want to miss out on anything. Why should I? Why should I be deprived of Chinatown or Sleeper?

A simulacrum that becomes more real than the thing it represents. And that’s how I define great art. Look, I don’t get to go around feeling connected

Reading is an unambiguously good thing in a life that’s been filled with mixed blessings.