"Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgement and nothing can help you escape it--that no substitute can do your thinking . . . that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority of your brain, the acceptance of his assertations as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence."
"I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life."
"I don't work with collectives. I don't consult, I don't co-operate, I don't collaborate."
"It was a war in which he was invited to fight nothing, yet he was pushed forward to fight, he had no choice--and no adversary." .
"There are things one must not contemplate, he thought. There is an obscenity of evil which contaminates the observer. There is a limit to what is proper for a man to see."
"If what he saw around him was the world in which he lived, then he did not want any part of it, he did not want to fight it. He was an outsider with nothing at stake and no concern for remaining alive much longer."
"Why is there nothing but misery left for anyone? Why do we suffer so much? . . . What are we doing? What have we lost?"
"Maybe it hurts so much that I don't even know I'm hurt. But I don't think so . . . I'm not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it's not really pain."
"One of the grimmest monuments to altruism is man's culturally induced selflessness: his willingness to live with himself as with the unknown, to ignore, evade, repress the personal (non-social) needs of his soul, to know least about the things that matter most, and thus to consign his deepest values to the impotent underground of subjectivity and his life to the dreary wasteland of chronic guilt. The cognitive neglect of art has persisted precisely because the function of art is non-social (This one is more instance of altruism's inhumanity, of its brutal indifference to the deepest needs of man--of an actual, individual man. It is an instance of the inhumanity of any moral theory that regards moral values as a purely social matter.) Art belongs to a non-socializable aspect of reality, which is universal (i.e., applicable to all men) but non-collective: to the nature of man's consciousness. One of the most distinguishing characteristics of a work of art (including literature) is that it serves no practical, material end, but is an end in itself; it serves no purpose other than contemplation--and the pleasure of that contemplation is so intense, so deeply personal that a man experiences it as a self-sufficient, self-justifying primary, and, often, resists or resents any suggestion to analyze it: the suggestion, to him, has the quality of an attack on his identity, on his deepest, essential self." .
". . . every loneliness is a pinnacle . . ."
"He never felt loneliness except when he was happy."
"It was he who had to make himself understand them . . ."
"I don't think that suffering makes up for anything, but whatever I felt, I didn't suffer enough. If there's one thing I loathe, it's to speak of my own suffering--that should be no one's concern but mine."
"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgements. By a selective re-creation, art isolates and integrates those aspects of reality which represent man's fundamental view of himself and of existence."
"An artist does not fake reality--he stylizes it. He selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant--and by isolating and stressing them, by ommiting the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence."
"Talk about all the things you really want said. Don't tell me about your family, your childhood, your friends or your feelings. Tell me about the things you think."
"Since a rational man's arbitraion is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a lifelong process--and the higher the values, the harder the struggle--he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully acheived. Art gives him that fuel; the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one's own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one's ideal world."
"It was he who had to make himself understand them . . ."
"Men are important only in relation to other men, in their usefulness, in the service they render. Unless you understand that completely, you can expect nothing but one form of misery or another."
"Worry is a waste of emotional reserves."
"The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself . . . The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary."
". . .He would concede that attacks of loneliness had begun to strike him at times; but it was a loneliness to which he was entitled, it was hunger for the response of some living, thinking mind. He was so tired of all these people, he thought in contemptuous bitterness . . ."
"No work is ever done collectivelty, by a majority decision. Every creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought."
"She felt no pain. She knew that the pain would come later and that it would be a tearing agony of pain, and that the numbness of this moment was a rest granted to her, not after, but before, to make her ready to bear it. But it did not matter. If this is required of me, then I'll bear it--she thought."
"When a man denounces his mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess. When he preaches contradictions, he does so in the knowledge that someone will accept the burden of the impossible, someone will make it work for him at the price of his own suffering or life; destruction is the price of any contradiction."
"When one learns to translate the meaning of an art work into objective terms, one discovers that nothing is as potennt as art in exposing the essence of a man's character. An artist reveals his naked soul in his work . . ."
"Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check you road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."
"Nothing can make self-immolation proper . . . Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability."
"To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason--Purpose--Self-Esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knnowledge--Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to acheive--Self-Esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living."
