The Visible Man

You can buy love—not completely, but partially. You can, and never believe otherwise.

We don’t have ways to quantify ideas like “amazing” or “successful” or “lovable” without the feedback of an audience.

What I came to realize is that people need their actions to be scrutinized and interpreted in order to feel like what they’re doing matters. Singular, solitary moments are like television pilots that never get aired. They don’t count. This, I think, explains the fundamental urge to get married and have kids, or even just the need to feel popular an

You want to know what I really learned? I learned that people don’t consider time alone as part of their life. Being alone is just a stretch of isolation they want to escape from.

This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend—movies can’t show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.

Our world is really backward, Victoria. It’s backward. Look what society does. It takes the handful of people who know how to succeed and makes them feel terrible for being different. Everyone is supposed to be mediocre, I guess.

We always end up being ourselves, somehow. I was who I was long before I consciously became the person I am. Being unseen makes me feel different than other people, but I’ve always felt different than other people. Invisibility isn’t the issue. The difference is that I’ve always possessed the single-minded dedication to make an impossible scenario

too. What I do is much closer to illusion. I relate to people like David Blaine: We both do something visually confounding that demands physical endurance. The only difference is that I’m doing something essential. Magicians only want to get laid.”

How does that old Richard Pryor line go? ‘I know guys who’ve used cocaine every single day for ten years and never got addicted.’