Quotes from Arthur Phillips

I like Shakespeare. I like some of his work a lot.

As a rule, I am lazy and prefer to avoid anything resembling work, and research feels like work, as opposed to my strong suit, which is sitting around making things up.

But music is, at the very minimum, inflammatory, exclusionary, divisive, encouraging of snobbery and solipsism.

How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something

I'm an aesthetic empiricist. If you like something, it doesn't matter who made it. There really is no objective standard other than your own taste. You develop your own tastes, you find things that do or do not fit your tastes, and therefore are or are not 'good.' Whether they have been labeled as produced by the right person is another matter.

Love is not sufficient. It never has been. Stories that claim otherwise are lies. There's always SOMETHING after happily ever after.

He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.

How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something

It was so much easier to be alone, if one could find just the right location.

You deicde, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.

Every secret is a wrinkle.

The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.

She had burned through a fair sampling of manhood trying to find someone, not to make her "happy" - that wasn't the point - but to cauterize her relentlessly dripping wounds.

The strangest thing. I came to the end of other people so quickly. Each new person was like a glass of water, and at the beginning I was parched, but then each glass tasted a little worse, the water was grittier, and by the end even the first sip was enough to make me gag, you know?

All of this vain heartbreak that we cling to as important or tragic would one day be revealed - by TV scientists - for what it is: just behavior.

Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" wrote Marlowe, the man Shakespeare feared for many years was the better writer, the man who with those words issued a license to misery to millions of underexperienced teenagers and thousands of overeducated middle-aged jackasses.

He considered her ruthless, in his moments of pain, but also in moments of happiness, experienced mere feet from her but bound right wrist to left ankle by her rules: nothing could evolve, nothing could be consummated, nothing repressed could surface, nothing previously accepted could be ignored. One must not speak of it, in case one could no longer sing of it. Instead, she only kept directing his attention to the wondrously charged air they could tame and make dance between them.

All our skill at disproving things is like a wall we build between us and wonder. To jump that wall, you need a long running start.-The Tragedy of Arthur

So why did poor artists originally hang around in cafes?" "I don't know. Inspiration from the atmosphere." "Ha! No, you've been tricked, too, just like the rest of us. Cafes didn't have inspirational atmosphere at first. That only came later, when you knew artists had been hanging around in them.

History is written by the future, and therefore distorted at its start.

But music is, at the very minimum, inflammatory, exclusionary, divisive, encouraging of snobbery and solipsism.

There was a deep pleasure in simply knowing what happened to everyone at the end.

The highest task of intelligence: to imagine a future and then smooth its approach.

Or. A golden word: "Or." Opportunities, rebirths, other roads.