Never believe in anything more than you believe in the person next to you. That’s been my guiding philosophy for all these many years.A lesson I learned long ago is that the thing people are willing to pay more for than anything else is the alleviation of pain; ideally to the point of total elimination. This knowledge served me quite well in my younger days.
It never stops, the work. At each stage in life, I keep thinking: now, now I have finally made it, now my work is through, now I can just do whatever I want to. Each time I am proved wrong again. Each time the work doesn’t stop. Each time I don’t get to do whatever I want to.
Yes, of course I remember feeling that. I was-- as hard as it may be for you to imagine-- young once too. Those feelings you speak of, however, were, for me, always fleeting, never sustained. The reason for this was that the feelings were never my own, they always belonged to someone else, and as much as I might like to keep them for myself, I know that I cannot, that I must return them to their rightful owner, for the joy of finding and holding what is someone else’s can only be fleeting, while the pain of losing what is one’s own can last a lifetime; even more than a lifetime sometimes.
Never go looking for an enemy, it’s the biggest mistake you can make. Why? Because you’ll make one that’s why. You’ll make an enemy where there was none before. You’ll have brought an enemy into the world, and enemies are bad things.
I have to be honest with you: I’ve never had much patience with stories.
I don’t like hearing them nor do I like telling them. Yes, I can well see that looking at someone who has lived as long as I have and has seen as much as I have, you would think that someone like that would have loads of stories to tell. But I don’t. I believe that a story, no matter how artfully told, no matter how intricately detailed, is never what really happened and will inevitably lead the listener astray. To tell a story or to hear a story is, ultimately, to experience a betrayal, for memory is never the same as truth. No, I’m sorry but I can only disagree. The closer, the more ardently held, the further a memory moves away from truth and the closer it comes towards myth, and a myth mistaken for truth is one of the most dangerous things there is in this world of ours.
No, I have nothing against language, quite the contrary. I love language. It is simply the confusion of memory and truth that I object to. Sure, language is inseparable from memory. Of course, we could not even begin to have any language without memory. All I want you to understand here is that the memory of language and the memory of what is commonly referred to as reality are distinct operations that should not be confused with one another. Language is capable of being true only in relation to itself. This is enough.The way I see it, true honest sexual desire is the will of God. If your desire comes from deep down in the core of your being then it is right and just. Yes, of course honest sexual desire has destroyed many who have submitted to it, there’s no getting around that. Some it has even turned into sociopaths who destroy others. But these people, whether they are destroying themselves or others, that does not mean they are not responding to the will of God. There is nothing that says the will of God must coincide with either the individual or the common good. The will of God is just the will of God.