Essays and Fictions

Danny said it took at least twenty minutes of chasing the rooster in circles until the geometry lined up.

Lee was never sad or angry. She seemed happy to just be alive. She wasn’t pretentious or interested in what I did. She never once asked me if I thought she looked good. She was confident and funny and spontaneous.

Novels, suicide notes and memoirs all have one thing in common: they’re all fictions. Novels, obviously. Memoirs, while promising the truth of a life, are still inherently fictional by virtue of what’s excluded and what’s amplified. Memoirs are the manipulative presentation of one’s life for public consumption. The mundane and the embarrassing are

In the end, I only believe in Siddhartha Gautama and Bertrand Russell. And although I’ve published many things indicating otherwise, I believe the only truly original artists of the last one hundred odd years are Vladimir Nabokov and Patricia Highsmith.

Sex requires someone else, usually. Drugs are for being alone. People who like to get fucked up with other people are not people I like to get fucked up with. Because getting fucked up is for doing alone. Or, very rarely, with someone who is likeminded and handles their drugs well; who doesn’t talk too much and will let you rest your legs on their

The things I’ve done for sex and drugs: unspeakable. The things sex and drugs have done for me: my entire output. And enough material to last me another lifetime as an artist.

The door opened and a woman in her late forties came out. She had permed hair, a linen jacket, printed skirt; her eyes were puffy and swollen from crying. So, it’s one of these offices, I thought. An office without a secondary exit. I liked secondary exits. The suffering needn’t meet the suffering in the anteroom of suffering.

Danny had a parrot named Fucker. And besides dealers and hookers, Danny only had two visitors to his house—his mother and his parole officer. The parrot didn’t have many words or sentences to blurt out, because neither did Danny. So his parole officer would drop in, or his mother might bring him a casserole, and Fucker would say one of two things:

William Eggleston once said that his entire body of work was an attempt to write a novel. I think my entire body of work is a suicide note.