Augusten Burroughs
18 quotes
Biography
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
"Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face."
"Doctor, if being a bitch is healthy, then I am the healthiest damn woman on the face of the earth"
"I am prone to envy. It is one of my three default emotions, the others being greed and rage. I have also experienced compassion and generosity, but only fleetingly and usually while drunk, so I have little memory."
"Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people."
"The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work."
"When people meet me, many times they're very surprised because they expect someone who is kind of wacky with seven piercings and very hip and cool and New York City, and I'm not."
"I think people tend to see the bigger point, which is maybe not fitting in and feeling like you didn't have the childhood that you expected you would have, or that you felt lonely or struggled with drugs and alcohol or just that you were able to achieve your dreams."
"The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work."
"Marriage is overdone. As long as there are people, people are going to find it interesting."
"My parents had this relationship that was really terrifying. I mean, the level of hatred that they had, and the level of physical abuse - my mother would beat up my father, basically - and I think I was drawn to images on television that were bright and reflective."
"I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father."
"I was desperate to discover what nothing felt like. It was the absence of something that attracted me. It was the start. Everything important originated with nothingness."
"My question was:How did I go from merely seeing the dirty French Santa in a bar to being in his hotel room the next morning? And this presented me with an actual equation. How did one plus one equal old French Santa?"
"Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping."
"I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stunned by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say, "Hi." They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word."
"He continues to smile expectantly. I take a step back. I don't want to catch whatever he has. He is a disturbing out-of-uniform Santa."
"I think out of seven billion people, there is probably more than just one soul mate. Surely, the paid employee in charge of each person's love life has taken into account the possibility of fatal snake bites and heavy falling objects."