Michael > Recent Status Updates

“Everything is relative. ‘The Straight Story’ is a peaceful story, but there’s violence in it, too. When Alvin’s lawnmower threatens to go out of control, that’s very violent for Alvin, but it’s balanced — there has to be balance in a film. Once you start down a path you’ve got rules, and you have to obey the rules of the path you’re on, and you can’t go down two roads at the same time.”

“I think things happen the way they’re supposed to happen. When you get old you remember the way it was when you were doing your stuff, and you compare it with what’s happening today and you can’t even begin to explain the way things were to young people, because they don’t give a shit. Life moves on. One day these days will be their memories, and they won’t be able to tell anyone about that, either.”

I can’t talk about what the Red Room is, but I remember when the idea came and how thrilling it was to me. It opened up a thing in ‘Twin Peaks’ and led to many things. So it’s the pilot and the Red Room and where they led — put those things together and you’ve got the real ‘Twin Peaks.’ It’s a beautiful delicate thing, and there’s more going on than meets the eye, and there’s mystery in the air.

“I learned about failure, and in a way failure is a beautiful thing because when the dust settles there’s nowhere to go but up? and it’s a freedom. You can’t lose more, but you can gain. You’re down and everybody knows you’re down and that you fucked up and you’re a loser, and you just say, ‘Okay,’ and you keep working.”

Before I started meditating I worried that doing it would make me lose my edge, and I didn’t want to lose the fire to make stuff. I found out it gives you more fire to make stuff and more happiness in the doing and way more of an edge. People think anger is an edge, but anger is a weakness that poisons you and the environment around you. It’s not a healthy thing and it’s not good for relationships, for sure.

“While I was driving him back to the train station he said, ‘David, I think you should come to the Center for Advanced Film Studies in Los Angeles, California.’ That’s like telling somebody, You have just won five hundred trillion dollars! Or even greater than that! It’s like telling somebody, You’re going to live forever!”

“When I first met David he was doing Paris street scenes […] One day he came in with an oil painting of a boat by a dock. He was putting the paint on really thick at that point and a moth had flown into the painting, and as it struggled to get out of the paint it made this beautiful swirl in the sky. I remember he got so excited about that, seeing that death mixed in with his painting.”

“I tried speaking to her, but no words came. As if my tongue had been stung by a bee and had swelled up. In this world on the edge of reality, my body and my heart were not yet joined.”

“I think the people here don’t know they’re shadows. They think they’re real people, and that their shadows have been ripped apart from them and driven away to the world beyond the wall. But maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe those driven outside the wall are the real people, and those who remain here are the shadows. That’s my conjecture.”

“Had I come into this world as a human with a gift for writing and not as a talented tomcat I would certainly not dedicate my life to such a superfluous literary genre as fiction, which, after all, always legitimizes its existence through the yet unexplored depths of the human soul.”

“A voice no longer heard fades away in memory, after a few years it’s forgotten, as, they say, people who lose their sight gradually forget colors.”

“Words are nothing, the delirium of desires and phantasmagoria whirling in vain inside the hard, impenetrable concavity of the skull; only physical contact counts, the touch of another hand, the warmth of a body, the mysterious beat of a pulse. How long has it been since someone touched him, a figure folding in on himself on the train seat, as hard and mineral-like as a thick, closed seashell.”

“I’ve never owned a datebook and never kept a diary. It would have made my job easier. But I dodn’t want to quantify my life. I let it flow by, like mad money that slips through your fingers… When I thought about the future, I told myself that none of what I had lived through would ever be lost. None of it. I was too young to know that after a certain point, you start tripping over gaps in your memory.”

LOCKET, GEORGIA. “There’s probably no man alive who likes to see the sun rise as much as I do, and hates so much to see it set.”

“There are blanks in this life, white spaces you can detect if you open the ‘case file’: a single sheet in a sky-blue folder that has faded with time. That ancient sky blue has itself turned almost white. And the words ‘case file’ are written across the middle of the folder. In black ink.”

“If we could relive something we’d already experienced, in the same time, the same place, and the same circumstances, but live it much better than the first time, without the mistakes, hitches, and idle moments, it would be like making a clean copy of a heavily revised manuscript…”

“For me, Paris is littered with ghosts, as numerous as metro stations and all the dots that light up when you press the buttons on the electric route map.
[…]
Ever since my childhood and adolescence, I’d felt a lively curiosity and a particular attraction for anything related to the mysteries of Paris.”