Literature

“I don’t think that every villain in the world actually thinks they’re being a good guy, but I do think that everybody creates a value system that justifies the actions they’re taking, and and I think there’s a difference between those two things. Not everybody believes that they’re on the side of righteousness, but everybody has a way of justifying the actions they’re taking. Not every villain has to be a misunderstood hero, and in fact I think there are a lot of instances throughout history of people who were obviously doing the wrong thing and probably had an understanding of that on some level, but had some rationale or justification for it. A lot of villains in literature and media have these weird, Thanos-esque philosophies of what it is that they’re trying to do, and I think human motivation tends to come from more primal places than that. So a lot of the villains I write can be brilliant or clever (and, in fact, probably should be), but their motivation tends to be primal. They wanna be rich, they wanna have power, they wanna live forever. There’s something deep down that is, when you break it down, not too complex. Right? If you look at the real world, the people that are doing bad stuff don’t need complex motivations. They wanna rule the world! They wanna be rich! They wanna be unafraid that other people can ever screw them over, so they screw other people over. Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundanes of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard.”

“A bird is safe in its nest - but that is not what its wings are made for.”

“You always learn from observing. You have to pick things up nonverbally because people will never tell you what you’re supposed to know. You have to get it for yourself: whatever it is that you need in order to survive. You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place.”

​“You hide the truth from yourself, and when it is forced upon you you either collapse or else you explode. You’re free to do so. But only if you can take it when you lose. And you can’t take it. You always try to get out of paying; you fly into a rage, you accuse other people right and left—anything at all not to own yourself in the wrong.”

““Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”

“In you was the sea.”

“We live on in desire.”

“She drinks in his honeyed whispers.”

“Writing to you is like kissing you. It is something physical,”

“We have no language between us. We have only ghosts between us.”

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot - it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.