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"After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident to one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact."
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"Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe. If you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become obvious yourself."
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Personal Development
"Don't judge me for escaping the stresses and cruelty of the world differently than you do."
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Personal Development
"Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests."
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Personal Development
"There must be some kind of way out of here,' said the joker to the thief..."
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Personal Development
"To be bowed by grief is folly; Naught is gained by melancholy; Better than the pain of thinking, Is to steep the sense in drinking."
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Personal Development
"Where else can we find happiness for a day other than from something that can offer momentary relief, something like the booze?"
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Personal Development
"I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life."
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Personal Development
"To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape."
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Personal Development
"No one loves us here, let's go to Mars."
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Personal Development
"I'm going out for a bottle of champagne. We're going to get bombed."
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Personal Development
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"I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with political fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky. But even Tolstoy got really tiresome when he was talking about the serfs. You have to let characters be characters, not [gruff voice] Mr Capitalism or [girlie voice] Miss Anti-Fur."
Writing
"We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people " the ancients no less than us " have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self."
Control
"Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life."
Life
"But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there."
Meaning
"Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost's, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark."
Isolation
"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."
Time
"For humans-trapped in biology-there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage."
Mortality
"When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change."
Comfort
"I really do work in solitude."
Work
"In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out."
Work
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