Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want … so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

I wish you way more than luck.