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some people never go crazy. what truly horrible lives they must live.
to awaken in a cheap room in a strange city and pull up the shade— this was the craziest kind of contentment and to walk across the floor to an old dresser with a cracked mirror— see myself, ugly, grinning at it all. what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, don’t slough in the slime. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, stay out of the clutches of mediocrity and self-pity.
born into this into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
if it doesn’t come rushing out of you, don’t do it. unless it comes bursting out of your ears and your head and your ass and your bellybutton, don’t do it. if you have to sit for an hour staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter, don’t do it. if you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it. if you’re doing it because you want women in your bed, don’t do it. if you have to sit there and rework it, rewrite it, don’t do it.
unless it comes bursting through your skull like a rocket, unless being still about it would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it. unless the sun inside of you is burning your guts out, don’t do it. when it is known to you truly, it will do it by itself and it will keep doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. there never was.
