To know yourself to an excessive degree is to know the uselessness of knowing yourself.

The curse of self-knowledge is that by repeatedly turning your attention inwards, you start rewarding yourself for the feeling of insight, rather than actual change. So naturally the mind keeps generating more insight as it's chasing that reward, and you end up chronically stuck because you feel like you're moving when you're just orbiting yourself.

Told my mother that I met a woman who is very cute and she literally just said "I really don't think you like women."

To create anything beautiful in your lifetime you must completely ignore the endless opinions of the suffocated biomass.

I simply accept my extreme loneliness as punishment for something I did in a past life and don't worry about it.

Imagine a man so evil, so foul, so terrible, that everyone who looked upon him was so horrified that they immediately became aware of the fragments of evil within themselves that enabled this perfect being of terror to exist, and in the wake of that evil they realized they had to do everything they could to pluck the fragments of destruction out of themselves so as to never have to experience something like that again. If a man was evil enough, he could make flowers grow wherever he walked.

I have watched men in silk robes issue commands that echo in empty halls while a grandmother with bread-making hands speaks once and three generations move as one body. This is the secret they do not teach you: authority is grown in soil watered by years of small mercies, and the woman who fed you when you were hungry owns a part of your soul that no contract can ever purchase, no threat can ever break. Power lives in the debt of gratitude, and the one who makes others suffering lighter holds more dominion than the one who makes their own name louder.

Literally everything on earth is now some grotesque abortion of "Self-Help," all the politics, books, music, film, and online content exists as salvationist phantasmagoria that tries to stop you from confronting yourself as you are, charred flesh, a primal beast in need of love.

We must risk being vulnerable even if it leads to humiliation.

Honestly once I get over my burnout, depression, creative block, doomscrolling addiction, tendency to over intellectualize and avoidant behaviors then you'll see

I have been so sad and horny lately, which is the perfect combination for a catastrophe.

I cannot stand The Binding of Isaac it's so ugly. It's literally dungeon rooms filled with cartoon poop piles and the items are all like Methuselah's Unwashed Boxers.

It's more honorable to be a loser in times where all concepts of winning demand that you degrade your soul.

By far the best writing advice I've ever heard was when Lynch said you have to write down good ideas right away or you'll forget them and then want to kill yourself.

Many teachers express surprise at the switch-off that occurs at puberty, but I don't, because first of all the child has to hide the sexual turmoil he's in, and secondly the grown-ups' attitude to him completely changes.

Suppose an eight-year-old writes a story about being chased down a mouse-hole by a monstrous spider. It'll be perceived as 'childish' and no one will worry. If he writes the same story when he's fourteen it may be taken as a sign of mental abnormality. Creating a story, or painting a picture, or making up a poem lay an adolescent wide open to criticism. He therefore has to fake everything so that he appears 'sensitive' or 'witty' or 'tough' or 'intelligent' according to the image he's trying to establish in the eyes of other people. If he believed he was a transmitter, rather than a creator, then we'd be able to see what his talents really were.

We have an idea that is self-expression --- which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God. Maybe a mask-maker would have fasted and prayed for a week before he had a vision of the Mask he was to carve, because no one wanted to see his Mask, they wanted to see the God's. When Eskimos believed that each piece of bone only had one shape inside it, then the artist didn't have to 'think up' an idea. He had to wait until he knew what was in there --- and this is crucial. When he'd finished carving his friends couldn't say 'I'm a bit worried about that Nanook at the third igloo', but only, 'He made a mess getting that out!' or 'There are some very odd bits of bone about these days.' These days of course the Eskimos get booklets giving illustrations of what will sell, but before we infected them, they were in contact with a source of inspiration that we are not. It's no wonder that our artists are aberrant characters. It's not surprising that great African sculptors end up carving coffee tables, or that the talent of our children dies the moment we expect them to become adult. Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticised not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is.