Aphorisms 3
Sphinx blocks path, poses riddle. But you have infinite time to consider your answer. So you just rest there—you and the sphinx. And you live the rest of your life with her. She turns out to be a gracious host.
The justification is always false.
Poetry requires translation. For example, the “gong-tormented sea” translates to “the sea.”
The novelist writes for the reader of novels.
The male ego dictates that if something feels good, it can only feel better done harder.
All words are synonymous because we’re all saying the same thing.
Jesus wept and wept and wept.
When you do apply your energies to something, it must be something no one else’s lassitude takes offense to.
One only plays the music of others as if to will the voice their own.
Reputation is calculated absence.
Empathy is not putting yourself in others’s shoes. Empathy is one big shoe.
The state of affairs today is worse than blind leading blind—it is the blind being led by dogs.
The only thing worse than x is not being able to use x as an excuse.
The principle of suicide is that gravity gives out before rope.
The Miranda rights pick up where Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus leaves off.
Good is the enemy of good enough.
Homeless people look in trashcans not actually to look, but to look like they’re looking—so someone will notice them, pity them, and just give them money instead.
What interests me is not what’s said but that it is said at all.
Pedophiles need to grow up. Or at the very least, the kids do.
The artist seems less and less he who makes art, than he who introduces himself as “artist.”
“The center will not hold.” Says who? Some poet? Yes the center will hold!
His love is strong whose love is a conception.
The pianist doesn’t “feel” the heart or the tragedy of the music he plays, he feels the haughtiness of playing the heart and the tragedy.
One often mistakes for sad what is merely reflective.
Identify is a fiction, group identity, a fraud.
All art is a process of discovery, in that everything is a process of discovery, and art is a “thing.” Discovery, is taking a long route to go a short way.
Love of beauty is fear of shame.
To be an artist is to be permissive of content, exacting of form.
Art is like hair: it’s styled how it itches.
Photography is the art of standing in relation.
Nothing’s more unattractive—than unattractive and vain.
It’s more reverent to not capitalize the ‘g’ in god, as in god not as man but as thing.
Revenge is never cold, by definition reheated.
Returning to the fragments of an unfinished novel after many years, is like returning to the fragments of a half-made cake—except in the case of the cake, it is the batter which has gone rotten, while in the case of the novel, it is the baker.
Being able to laugh at oneself is a virtue—but only when you’re funny.
Is the artist the man who stands apart or is the man who stands apart an artist?
In the beginning was man, and the man had son, and the man saw the universal in son and thought it was himself in his son.
Beauty is subjective, but not that subjective.
There are no “underground men”—only temporarily embarrassed men of the world.
Fight or flight—the chicken, or the egg?
Lust is a plague, cumming lances the bubo.
Everything the penis touches feels good; it is not very subtle in its observations.
A life lived as a woman who’s anything less than drop-dead gorgeous, is a life not worth living at all.
Never meet your heroes. Don’t even read their biographies.
The best and worst part of writing, as opposed to painting—no models.
A lot of people think being a writer is to bear all, but actually, it is to bear nothing. Being a writer means repeating all the things that were already written before.
Narrative and ego are one.
To hold all things at once is to keep everything at arm’s length.
Therapy: “RELATIONSHIP” in plain black font against a plain white background.
The small child in public is always performing. Either that or suffering from stage fright.
Beauty before age.
Good artists borrow; great artists beg.
The only true revolutionary slogan is “Je m’en fiche.”
Novelist: philosopher’s alibi.
Life is easy: you fill it to a surfeit, then coast.
To be misunderstood is to misunderstand.
We cannot engage others, only ourselves.
How many souls have languished in mathematics and physics all the while their true genius, unbeknownst to them, was as sweatshop worker or field hand?
Writing is what gets done “on the side,” as it were, while more serious work is underway. Unlike music it can never exist in and of itself. To write implies a referent.
There is art that is earnest and real, which is frivolous; and there is art which passes the dreadful time—and every magnificent work belongs to this second category.
When the pianist comes on stage, she does not carry her instrument.
One does not express oneself in what one creates, one hides oneself behind it; creation is a distancing effect, a gate to halt the barbarians's approach.
The metaphor of image abides by different rules than the reality of sound it describes.
The dilettante is the abortive unifier.
Beauty is the beholding of beauty. The fact of recognition is more beautiful than the loneliest wood, the lengthiest, ruddiest sunset, the doe with the skimpiest legs and most taciturn smile. In every pageant the sash should go to the judge and not the contestant.
The proper domain of conceptual art is literature. It would be just as powerful, impactful, interesting, effective, in writing—as it would if actually done.
Face down your desire, and desire will be the first to look away.
If slavery can be covert, if we can have liberty within a certain latitude and remain ignorant of our true state, this does not make reality more horrifying, but slavery less horrifying.
To call Egon Schiele’s portrait of hands a fragment is an insult to hands.
When a daughter marries a writer, her family gains a child.
The greatest musician is the musicologist.
Aphorism: sentence in search of a home.
Painting captures impressions of light, film impressions of memory, literature impressions of impressions.
Thievery is the sincerest form of flattery.
Artists are latchkey children in turnkey homes.
The musician’s ears perk up at melodies, tones, harmonies; the writer’s at the names of composers and compositions. The musician respects the thing in itself; the writer loves the respect he feels for other people.
Music is not heard by the people that sing it.
The three most important considerations in writing are repetition, repetition, repetition.
Nature and nurture are no excuse.
Perhaps the sole good reason for building a relationship with another human being is to prevent one’s being alone at restaurants.
All artists are narcissists, and insofar as a work of art can resonate with a public, it resonates with their egos.
Intelligence is recall.
Grace is forgetfulness.
You can’t break an omelet without making a few eggs.
Every time you strive for the perfection of a month, you acquire the sickness of a year.
An artist is he who commands attention.
Love is creating a fictional version of someone so you don't have to hate them.
Home is what we take for granted. The wandering man is the most entitled.
It doesn’t matter that you not take advantage of others, it matters that you trust no one takes advantage of you. In other words, you can always run the red light so long as you also never look both ways before crossing.
It is our emotional lot to confuse all intensities for one another. Thus fear becomes desire and love sex.
A great sentence should trump the paragraph that contains it. We write to be excerpted.
Art is not fidelity to sight but what is expedient to the hand.
The capitalist sells every part of the buffalo.