A Quote by Allan Gurganus
I'm a great admirer of Primo Levi's work. It's always mind-boggling, the idea of how much pain people can endure and still come back from the edge with a sense of humor, with this tremendous animal desire we have to get on with life.
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God has a tremendous sense of humor! Religion remains something dead without a sense of humor as a foundation to it. God would not have been able to create the world if he had no sense of humor. God is not serious at all. Seriousness is a state of disease; humor is health. Love, laughter, life, they are aspects of the same energy.
Again and again, Primo Levi's work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn't.
Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding. Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.
I did loads of auditions and I didn't get called back. I still get giddy at all the people I get to work with, and I'm still enjoying the work and enjoying life too much that I don't feel like I've done that much.
When I was a child, I had posters of James Dean in my room. I was a big admirer of his work and was fascinated by him living on the edge. Looking back, my life was kind of the same.
How do these people have any credibility? How do they get away with this? It's mind boggling that its gotten to a point where the EPA is dictating policy based on what is an obvious fraud, or if you want to be gentle about it, creates enough doubt to back off.
A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.
I was watching lectures by Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Dr. Sebi and Umar Johnson. It's super mind opening when you listen to those words and think about how much they still resonate today. Think about how true those words are, and how much they predicted the future. That was what was really mind-boggling to me.
Zen is non-serious. Zen has a tremendous sense of humor. No other religion has evolved so much that it can have that sense of humor.
When somebody says that six million people died in the Holocaust, there is nobody in the world who can understand that. It's only through story, reading books by Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, that you really begin to understand the trauma and how horrible it actually was.
Primo Levi's - I mean, he's a very different kind of writer. He's a much more formal writer. He's a much more -almost detached. I mean, I wouldn't really say that he's detached ultimately. But he does write as a scientist, and so he describes things very - in great detail, very carefully.
Sometimes, when you live a life at such a wild edge, an extreme edge of experience, you can come back into the world - if you come back at all - with some essence from that experience that people find useful.
There's not too much Edge in Adam Copeland, but there's a little bit of my sarcasm and my sense of humor, I guess, but I'm not a sleazy, raving maniac like the character of Edge could be.
The people I am most interested in are the ones on the edge of losing everything and falling into the last bit of despair. I'm trying to write about how people exist on that edge and how they can come back.
It's the disease of thinking that a having a great idea is really 90% of the work. And if you just tell people, 'here's this great idea,' then of course they can go off and make it happen. The problem with that is that there's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a having a great idea and having a great product.
Humor disarms people. It opens them up to starting a dialogue about things they wouldn't normally talk about. I don't understand how people who don't have a sense of humor get through life.
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