Quotes from Dennis Cooper

I drank his blood, piss, vomit. I shoved one hand down his throat, one hand up his ass and shook hands with myself in the middle of his body, which sounds funny, but it wasn't.

The fact that even innovative art grows cordial over time is a catastrophe that makes groundbreaking young musicians with drinking problems for good reasons know they can't be gods with giant amps despite the bliss that animates them when they're trying hard.

To speak somewhat frankly, every boy I've known as well as killed has struck me as his corpse's baby picture.

But Henry didn't care how sexily I described the idea of him dead. He just listened and nodded like I was giving him directions to the next town.

What you seem to like in my drawings is how they reveal the dark underside, or whatever it's called, of people you wouldn't think were particularly screwed up. But you should know the real goal of my work is a Dorian Gray type of thing. I make you look awful, and I start to look really good….

I felt that when I'd wished to die, I was being who I really was, sans interference from the world or from the priorities and hopes that had polluted me through other people's minor needs for me or from the books I read incessantly. It was like I'd found myself, and I was someone who had never had the things I really wanted, plainly never would, and whom no one would fully comprehend.

Punk orders us to demystify everything in the world or we'll be doomed to a future so decadent, atomic bombs will seem just one more aftershave lotion and so on. What you seem to like in my drawings is how they reveal the dark underside, or whatever it's called, of people you wouldn't think were particularly screwed up. But you should know the real goal of my work is a Dorian Gray type of thing. I make you look awful, and I start to look really good….

He still looked cute enough to justify what was starting to happen, whatever that was.

I felt as though my wish for death contained a kind of logic that I couldn't access with my usual overly protective thoughts. That, prior to then, I'd been a kind of actor or self-hypnotist, not just when I socialized with other people but when I even thought of other people, which, put together, constituted almost always. That my wish had been completely understanding because it knew me, unlike my friends.

a handful of films that the passage of time has revised from daring cinematic gestures to unwatchable displays of self-indulgence

I often half wonder why it is that life, or mine at least, seems less to change from day to day than to be solved like an equation.

not yet knowing myself in the slightest, I'd done nothing but convince myself I was in love with one cute, suicidal basket case after another.

the strange propriety that puts the Japanese among the earth's most civilized degenerates

When I started writing I was a sick teenaged fuck inside who partly thought I was the new Marquis de Sade, a body doomed to communicate with Satan who was us- ing my sickness as his home away from home, and there's your proof.

Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn't actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.

Love: a hybrid emotion made up of various other emotions collaged by some weak individual's mind to try to quell a particular horror that's not been wiped out by more standardized symbols like Christ, etc. Nietzsche, right? Whatever.

When a child grows old enough to know J.R.R. Tolkien was just staring at a typewriter, the truth can be a wounding exposé.

I'm a talentless but popular young singer and I have the feeling someone is watching me. I use the term loosely because I have few feelings, and even they're too simple, like primary colors.

I like flat black. It doesn't try to explain anything, and it's been hip since before I was born, I guess.

Mira... Tú y yo somos iguales. Lo único es que tú te decoras de forma aterradora por fuera y yo me decoro de forma aterradora por dentro.

But here I am blocking the view of this simple scene, like a director who accidentally walks in front of his own projector, then stands there, oblivious to the snoring around him.

Emotional. Out of his mind grateful. Anything goes. I love you, I love you, I love you.

I want to love someone so selflessly that he would never even think about going away. I suppose that's what most people want. In fact, that's probably why we don't kill one another all the time. Everyone's just a little too lonely to risk it.

When you see everything you realize nothing means anything.