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"That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored."
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"We live with the key purpose of receiving the approval of those around us because we don't know who we are in reality."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A complex is stealing energy from our personality."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A 'biomass' man lives by his instincts."
Author Name
Personal Development
"All energy given to us for the achievements of goals and self-actualization is instead spent on deriving acceptance from our surroundings and compliance with the requirements of the society."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Nothing humbles a beautiful woman better than not being wanted by a man whose girlfriend or wife is ugly (or not as beautiful as she is)."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Your mindset serves as the operating system for your entire life's experience."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A poor but confident man is as hard to find as a rich but shy man."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Saying that you do not remember something or someone is a less embarrassing or hurtful way of saying that you do not know it or them anymore."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We are not as important to most people as we are to ourselves. As a matter of fact, we are-to most people-not important at all."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Life ups the self-esteem of a low-paid man by giving him things that the high-paid man that he envies cannot buy (intellect, looks, sex appeal, etc.)."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as - and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be - lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason or even to go on living, before they were 'saved."
Religion
"We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?"
Fact
"The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me."
Awareness
"Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me."
Art
"Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it."
Struggle
"Fiction's about what it is to be a human being."
Being
"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."
Freedom
"Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh."
Art
"There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone."
Art
"Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."
Art
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