Quotes from Andrew Durbin

Behind the toilet, a sculpture of a penis urinated into a bowl after you flushed. Too much cock.

The personality is determined by a variety of interventions that enter the head like big symbolic flags in the conquered soil which seldom knows its defeat.

All fiction is about writing.

Amazing that Americans can obtain so much mass, approximate stuff of two or three people in Beijing.

Exterior: the jungle. Interior: Dark night of the white man's soul.

The clouds in the movies have always seemed more real to me than those on TV. There would be no clouds on Modern Family , that was certain, and I was not sure I could work in a world without clouds.

We knew something about one another, sure, that we belonged to the same tribe, the markings of which were always visible to those who belong, even if they were invisible to outsiders.

I am thrilled that I can lend him something and never worry about its return since its life in the cloud totally absolves us of all the guilty lender/borrower feeling of when should I ask for it back.

Liberate yourself by hurling excrement at what ought to be covered in shit anyway.

Sometimes I daydream about merging my body with my computer so that I can more fully enter the landscapes of Google Earth, lush surface world without pollution or traffic, planet seen from the vantage point of space and roving surveillance vehicles, a motionless field, magnifying the normal imperfections and irregularities of the earth so that the planet is rendered transparent, misshapen and yet intoxicating in its languishing distinction from the real.

Forgoing outright atrocity, of which there is so much—too much—right now, aren't the 'life,''body,' and 'face' of Michael Jackson in the running for some of the most abstract events of the last century?

Every science fiction is a reading of the period that produced it.

My book had a shape, an arc—though I was still incapable of describing what that arc plotted or argued for. As a collection of texts, it moved between poetry and fiction, between Los Angeles and New York. The book struggled, self-consciously, with narrative: how to put the things that made up my life, but also the lives of others, into the form of a story.

The art world is an unregulated economy that borrows from other economies—theory, poetry, and scientific research, in this case—to continually update its relationship to the world and, in acting as a conduit for other (and all) disciplines, strives to become the clearest image of the world in which we may better see ourselves.

On Fire Island, you drifted, floated in a lazy river of other people's pheromones and bodily fluids, toward whatever house or cock or ass or what, whatever you wanted, that the current brought you to.

I was a writer, after all. Shouldn't I have a book?

We were not so great at what we did—or at least I wasn't—and I liked it that way: that no one seemed to care about the quality of any of this, any measurable greatness. We were tiny people, but our tininess was at times formidable.

The community of Fire Island is such that you take your place in it for granted, trust that no matter what happens or who it happens with, you will find your way back.

He called me "darling" in that obnoxious way gay men sometimes do.

He was a monk in an order of one.

Get rich. Live life to the fullest. Destroy the world.

What a story this place will tell," she said.

Crisis gives us shape, the contours of sympathetic form, whether we call it forth or not, whether or not it happened to us as we claim—or remember—it did.

A catastrophe is an opportunity.