Just Like Real Life

“I let everything burn.”

“A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.”

“We tell stories not to die of life…”

But the world did go on, unashamed, after you

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

We’re all performing our bruises.

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.

I obviously do everything to be ‘hard to understand’ myself.

As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn’t have.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

A bad idea written down is far better and far more useful to you than a blank sheet of paper and a mythical piece of brilliance that has been stuck in your head out of fear of failure. Go ahead and fail. Then make it better.

Do not expect people to tell you the truth because they also lie to themselves.

I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.

We’re talking about the novel, right? But maybe we’re not. We’re talking about ourselves. And I guess that’s what can start to happen when you talk about a book.

I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.