Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.
books humanity judgement literature
The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.
adaptation horror
She'd been an actress, an artist's model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader.
reading women
He loved the feel and smell of her palm and because he was one of those men who was always ultimately looking to dissolve himself into a woman.
touch tso-love women
The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.
bible creation lucifer meaningless story time
Humans are moving into a new phase, one based on the knowledge that talking about their feelings has never got them anywhere.
cynicism feelings
Hell [..] is the absence of God and the presence of Time.
hell
You took a life and the theft went unpunished. God didn't strike you down. The sky didn't fall. The morning after, you turned on the faucet and water still came out.. It was still good when you raised your arm for a cab and one came towards you out of the flow like magic. You did things that were supposed to end you and found they were only things that changed you. It was a disappointment and a revelation and a bereavement and a new thrilling nudity. It was the basic prosaic obscenity: You kept going.
consequences killing murder remorse
We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.
blame past
.. All his strength gathered in his hips and chest and his arms wrapped around me and his breath jabbed soft and hot in my ear and a note of tenderness was there at the end like a lovely curlicue and I liked him because there was no disguising the honest male gladness that went from his body out to mine.
male sex tso-love
For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do..[Lucifer]
lucifer satire theology
It rewrites the contract, I'd read somewhere. Your self's no longer central. This thing comes out of you and drags half your soul along after it like a blanket.
birth mother
Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities.
writing-process
You love life because life's all there is.
life-philosophy