Aaron > Aaron's Quotes

“Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel.”
― Hubert Selby Jr.

“Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done. ”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“Why did you start to write?


I left at 15.. I started to write becase I was taken off a ship from Germany when I was 18. They said I wouldn't live for 6 months.

I'd been given up for dead many times and I just didn't want to waste my life. I had what I now realize was a spiritual experience.

I realized that I would die,
and that just before I would die,
two things would happen.

number one, I would regret my entire life.
and number two, I would want to live my life over again.
and then I would die.
and that terrified me.

[...]

to think that I would live my entire life, look at it, and say oh..I blew it. was such a terrifying thought
that I bought a typewriter

I didn't know what I was going to do with it, but I bought a typewriter.
but that is what got me to start writing, was

I did not want to waste my life

I wanted to, and I HAD to, do something with my life”
― Hubert Selby Jr.

“I think the function of suffering is to let me know that my perception is skewed; what I’m doing is judging natural events in such a way that I am creating suffering within myself. For instance, you have pain over certain conditions, certain situations that occur. And if you just say ‘ok, here I am, I’m going to experience the pain,’ you don’t suffer. The resistance and the degree of the resistance to the natural phenomenon of life causes tremendous suffering.”
― Hubert Selby Jr.

“There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man's reach.. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.
”
― Jean Dubuffet

“Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”
― William Blake, Proverbs of Hell