Dylan is like a friend Ive returned to throughout my life. Jim Morriso — Michael Gira

"Everything merges eventually — everything is organic. It’s impossible to distinguish one thing from another thing. When your mind is emptied of selfishness, it crumbles and dissolves in the water. If I cut at my body and concentrate correctly, I wont feel it. Eachtime my heart beats, it jerks violently and whips my spine loose, tugging at the base of my brain. Memories move through the clotted and rotting forest inside my head and crush the present beneath them. My memories don’t belong to me. They’re as unknowable as a centipede fluttering its legs in the dark corner beneath the sink. When an image moves through my nervous system, it’s with the predatory greed of an intruder. My body’s laid open, transparent, defenseless. Each second of time is an individual insect feeding on my blood."

"In order to come out the winner, in my mind, I memorized their faces, down to the smallest detail, the smallest nuance of expression — the black curling hair growing out of his cheek that hed missed shaving, the pale pink blemish above her right eyebrow showing through the film of cream-colored makeup, applied with skillful thickness so that it blended out smoothly into her forehead. When I closed the door, I held them in my mind, exposing their image permanently onto a blank sheet in a secret file where I kept my memories for future use. Id use this and other memories of them to serve me, to make them please me. They were flimsy in there, among the images I preserved, foolish really, not threatening at all. Two people who crushed each others bodies every othernight beneath their mutual flab, muttering gratuitous, lustful phrases into each others waxy ears until theyd come. Then theyd roll over, farting a sleep-inducing lullaby."

"A shadow figure on the wall is cutting off the head of a little boy. The huge and looming murderer is holding up the head like a Viking showing off a war trophy. He’s swinging the head above him by the hair. Shadow-blood flies through the air in a black swirl. A handful of the boy’s brains land in my face like warm cottage cheese. There’s a fisheye close-up of a terrified eye in the TV screen. An oiled young stud does situps on his Soloflex machine, eviscerates himself with an impossibly honed and gleaming kitchen knife, flings his dangling intestines over his shoulder like a sashaying transvestite in a mink stole and walks straight into a day school room full of naked shit-smeared children, who devour him in a bloody tornado of razor-sharp teeth. They’re led away yapping and screeching like a pack of dogs on a multiple leash by their teacher, who wears a neon yellow leotard, purple high-heeled shoes, and has the slicked hard flesh of someone who obviously works out six hours a day herself..."

"I’ve got muscles, sol want to use them. I get up in the morning, pose naked in front of the mirror, and flex for half an hour. Looking at myself, I want to beat someone’s head in with my bare fist. I want to see my fist forced down some asshole’s face, reach down, grab a handful of intestines, and pull them up and out the throat. That would make me feel good. Whatever makes me feel good is what counts. The reason I build my muscles is to use them. That makes me feel good. Itd be senseless to work out for years just for the stupid satisfaction of feeling “healthy” or knowing I look good when I’m about to fuck somebody up the ass. I get satisfaction out of grinding a face in the pavement. I don’t want to question it. I like causing pain. That’s how Iam. I see an immediate response to something I just did. No bullshit. Pure animal pain, me the victor, me in control, me on top, you on the bottom."

"My bed sits in the center of the room, a steaming sarcophagus in a dim pagan tomb. The television is on a platform at my feet, washing my swaddled and bloated living corpse with ethereal blue light. Looking to the left, the wall is covered with the desiccated shell-bodies of cockroaches. Each time I catch one (and there are thousands, millions living in the walls, under the floor, in the ceiling — I hear them shifting like the waves in the sea in my sleep), I dry it slowly at low temperature in the oven, then I pin it to the wall. The wall glistens in the flickering light with the sheen of their armor. I’ve pinned them in spiraling primitive shapes that map out the cosmos, landscapes, stars, jagged lightning bolts, skulls, knives, fat hermaphroditic fertility symbols. The designs are difficult to discern, due to the fact that everything is the same brown-on-brown color scheme, but they’re there, if you look closely. I watch the wall for hours each day, like a mandala. The dancing shadows of the television give the detailed beadwork of the wall a sense of grandiosity. I pretend I’m in a cave beneath a jungle burial ground examining, awestruck, an ancient African mural I’ve discovered, cool and perfectly preserved beneath the malarial humidity."

"Willie Nelson has an ability that is particular to country music – these one-liners that set up a whole song, then everything else is built around that. I guess you could call them zingers. Crazy is the perfect song. Its an incredibly complex emotion: its concise, but it describes a state of mind so clearly and poignantly. Hes a true American poet."