Quotes from Kevin Wilson

I grew up not reading fiction; I watched movies and read comic books, and one of the ways I taught myself to think about narrative was through film.

A lot of times when I think I'm being self-sufficient, I'm really just learning to live without the things that I need.

Because I kept fucking up, because it seemed so hard to not fuck up, I lived a life where I had less than what I desired. So instead of wanting more, sometimes I just made myself want even less. Sometimes I made myself believe that I wanted nothing.

You took care of people by not letting them know how badly you wanted your life to be different.

Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them too.

Honestly, Bessie? People don't care about anyone but themselves. They don't notice anything. They are never looking at what's interesting. They're always looking at themselves.

What you'll find, I think, is that the things you most want to avoid are the things that make you feel the greatest when you actually do them.

The kids were happy. They had added another to their numbers. They didn't want to set the world on fire. They just wanted to be less alone in it.

I wasn't destined for greatness; I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

Even awful people can be polite for a few minutes," their father told them. "Any longer than that and they revert to the bastards they really are.

From that point on, I guess I sort of realized that my imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world. But if you keep something hidden away, all tied up, it's hard to summon it when you really need it.

This was what I finally realized, that even as we sank deeper and deeper into our lives, we were always separate. And I wondered what it would feel like, to fall but to hold on to someone else so you weren't alone.

I had never wanted kids, because I had never wanted a man to give me a kid. The thought of it, gross; the expectation of it. But if a hole in the sky opened up and two weird children fell to Earth, smashing into the ground like meteroites, then that was something I could care for. If it gleamed like it was radiating danger, I'd hold it. I would.

Something was ending. Even if it had been awful, my life was ending, and it felt like this wasn't my life anymore. It was someone else's. And I had decided that I'd just live inside it, see if anyone noticed, and maybe it would become mine. Maybe I would love it.

He tried to think of all the people in his life as chemicals, the uncertainty of mixing them together, the potential for explosions and scarring.

Things are bad and crazy and chaotic. But you ride it out and you don't let it hurt you, and then there's this stretch of time that is so calm and perfect. And that's what was always worth waiting for.

The simplest things are the hardest to understand.

Don't you see? The things we once loved do not change, only our belief in them... You are left with the only things that any of us have in the end. The things we keep inside of ourselves, that grow out of us, that tell us who we are.

Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.

Timothy's eyes kind of flashed with recognition, as if the seventeenth-century ghost who lived inside him had suddenly awakened.

If there were a button that would end the world, and that button were right in front of me, I would have smashed it so hard at that moment. I often thought about a button like that, and when I did, I always knew that I'd push it.

For a second, there was that weird flicker in her eyes, that wickedness that I loved, that I wanted to live inside. A wicked child was the most beautiful thing in the world.

I knew that whatever I chose would be the wrong thing. I knew that until I truly believed that whatever I did was the exact right thing, I'd keep doing the wrong thing.

And I knew a secret to caring for someone, had learned it just this moment. You took care of people by not letting them know how badly you wanted your life to be different.