Quotes from DBC Pierre

History's best thinkers eventually concluded that our flaws were too powerful to trust with freedom. Thus we've been groomed as hamsters in a wheel that benefits a laughing few. No more great works will be accomplished under the regime, because beauty is not democratic or profitable.

Looking around, I wonder what is it that makes my fellows able to bear such a life. How can they face the day, when I can't? Is there some secret to living that makes its conditions irrelevant? A neutering of expectation, a mastery of the mundane? Or have they just grown accustomed to rape?

What I'am learning is the world laughs through its ass every day, then just lies double-time when shit goes down. It's like we're on a Pritikin diet of fucken lies. I mean - what kind of fucken life is this?

A movie grants a visa. A book makes you a citizen.

Something to note if you're a people watcher: the most revealing insights are on the fringes, not at the core. A zealot leader might be a study in zeal, but a broader spectrum of colours will flash from his followers.

Although there can be fast improvements all over a book, it won't gel into a single cohesive life right away. Keep going, keep faith, because it can follow the reductive dynamic of a slow meat stock. You boil it down for fifty hours, and, sure, it distils mathematically, you can see it reducing and growing richer hour by hour. But flavour and texture don't gel until the last ten minutes. Always simmer your work until then.

action, including dialogue, is fast, and accelerates; reflective writing is a brake and slows—and they will set off a pumping action that makes the story breathe. The speed of that breathing is set by the measure of action to reflection. More action, less reflection—faster. More reflection, less action—slower.

Pace excites, and dialogue is pace. Falling into good dialogue on page one can put us in your pocket.

The beautiful thing about a book: once it runs it will never stop.

Now, 2.6 million years after we started making tools, the last 0.016 per cent of our history as produced the most change, an exponential curve turning vertical. It's why I keep saying 'a recent idea' to anything less than a couple of centuries old. That change is young, its paint is still wet. And it's still external, due to mechanisation and its effects, it hasn't really changed humans except to make the affluent fat—and by affluent I mean anyone who shits in good drinking water.

Technology can't do what humans do. Whatever it is that we do, we should do it now in earnest. If art is the gap's boatman, its job now grows critical: because it alone addresses our humanity. And we're going to need some of that.

We will all be destroyed whether we like it or not. I say let's like it.