In general, avoid getting into situations where you’re sacrificing today for an imagined tomorrow.

All real success is internal and has very little to do with external circumstances.

When I look back on my life, I want to say I saw the world the way it was.

I can give glib answers all day long, but you have to discover your own personal answer.

People spend too much time doing and not enough time thinking about what they should be doing

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Write what should not be forgotten.

Tears are words that need to be written.

More drugs are taken to quiet the mind than to heal the body.

Guilt is society’s voice speaking in your head.

Self-image is the prison. Other people are the guards.

On what he wants to be remembered for: Don’t care. I’ll be dead.

We are biological machines programmed to survive and replicate. Happy is anti-evolution.

Is it so important to me that I be unhappy unless this goes my way?

If raising children was less rewarding than not doing it, the human race would have gone extinct.

When you look at the greatest artists and creators, they have this ability to start over that nobody else does.

You have social statisticians, scientists, and researchers in lab coats, literally the best minds of our generation figuring out how to addict you to the news. And if you fall for it, if you get addicted. your brain will get destroyed. 

Suffering is a moment of clarity, when you can no longer deny the truth of a situation and are forced into uncomfortable change. Inside suffering is the seed of change.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Humans are always signaling. Rather than really looking at yourself, you’re looking at how other people look at you.

It’s kind of a disease – social media is making celebrities of all of us and celebrities are the most miserable people in the world.

Modern society will shame you for earning money, shame you for being happy, shame you for being raised well, shame you for having children, and ultimately, shame you for existing. It isn’t just religion that controls you by declaring you a sinner.

Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there’s no concept of right or wrong or good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences… and then you die. How you choose to interpret that is up to you. And you do have that choice.

If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially and morally bankrupt.

The most powerful people in the world today are the people who are writing the algorithms for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram because they’re controlling the spread of information. They’re programming the culture.

Involve groups in the creative process and you inevitably end up with a pile of pleasing, socially-acceptable lies. Contrast blockbuster movies with the great books.

The fundamental insecurity – most people need faith in something – religion, government, academia. Few are comfortable with decentralized systems.

We’re used to constantly judging things. The act of judging something separates you from that thing.

Over time, as you judge, judge, judge, you invariably judge people. You judge yourself. You separate yourself from everything, and then you end up lonely.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend.

A word after a word after a word is power.

That feeling of disconnection, loneliness, is eventually what leads to suffering.

Judgment allows us to move through the world, but it’s also what separates us from one another. If I’m judging my friends and family, I’m separating myself from them. I’m creating a gap between us by putting them down and propping myself up.

The universe has been around for a long time, and the universe is a very, very large place. If you’ll study even the smallest bit of science, for all practical purposes we are nothing. We are ameba. We are bacteria to the universe.

This universe has been around probably for 10 billion years or more, and will be around for tens of billions of years afterwards. Your existence, my existence is just infinitesimal. It’s like a firefly blinking once in the night.

When you’re on your death bed, when you’re on your last day, you’d give up every dollar in the bank for a few days, another hour, another minute.

We don’t always get what we want, but sometimes what is happening is for the best. The sooner you can accept it as a reality, the sooner you can adapt to it.

I do everything for me. I don’t do anything for other people. None of us do. I think we all like to pretend like we’re doing everything for other people, but the reality is, we’re always just doing it for ourselves. That’s just the truth, and so whenever people ask me why did I do X or Y or Z, it’s always for me; that’s why I did it.

I kind of feel like every moment is a death. You can’t go back to the past; no one’s ever gone back even a second. I don’t even remember what I said two minutes ago.

All that exists is this moment; it’s all there is. There is no future. That’s a fiction in your head that… nobody can predict the future. There is no past; nobody’s gone back even an inch in their past, not even a second, so that doesn’t exist.

Literally all that exists is this moment. I feel like you’re dying and being reborn at every moment. It’s just, it’s up to you to choose whether to forget it or to remember it.

If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.

The best style is the style you don’t notice.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

We feel guilt when we no longer want to associate with old friends and colleagues who haven’t changed. The price, and marker, of growth.

The reality is you’ve been dead for the history of the universe, it’s 10 billion years or more. You will be dead for the next 70 billion years or so until the heat death of universe.

Anything you do will fade. It will disappear, just like the human race will disappear and the planet will disappear. Get to Mars, even that group will disappear. No one is going to remember you past a certain number of generations, whether you’re an artist or a poet or a conqueror or a pauper or nothing. There’s no meaning.

My biggest fear is that I’m going to die without having really lived. I think everybody has that fear at some core level.

Everyone that ends up becoming an extreme winner in society starts off as a loser.