Selby Quotes & Sayings

I sit, I read, I listen to music, I go or a walk, I ride to Prospect Park and sit under the Willow Tree, I remember, I forget, I look at pictures, I do, I do, I do ... or I don't, but its peaceful ... only me ... no worries. — Hubert Selby Jr.

A guy needs something to give his life a reason or what's the point of living? — Hubert Selby Jr.

Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done. — Hubert Selby Jr.

There was a problem and that was that. Why didnt make a fiddlers fuck. — Hubert Selby Jr.

But I knew that someday I was going to die. And just before I died two things would happen; Number 1: I would regret my entire life. Number 2: I would want to live my life over again. — Hubert Selby Jr.

It's always the same
you get used to one thing, then it changes. Get used to another, and that changes. Over and over. Always the same.
O well, the hell with it. It's not important anyway. — Hubert Selby Jr.

In Malta, the Wars of Religion reached their climax. If both sides believed that they saw Paradise in the bright sky above them, they had a close and very intimate knowledge of Hell. — Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford

When I entered college, I wasn't sure what I was going to do. My advisor happened to be from the theater department, and he encouraged me to take some classes there, which I did. — David Selby

Remembering the treatment that had been accorded the Knights and soldiers of St. Elmo, the Maltese inhabitants of Senglea took no prisoners. Hence there arose the expression (used in Malta to this day) 'St. Elmo's pay' for any action in which no mercy is given. — Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford

And he just sat back and stared at the tube, almost interested in what was happening, trying to find the ability to believe in that lie so he could believe the one within. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Everything about it was wrong. Thats why it worked so good. — Hubert Selby Jr.

That's the reason support for the National Endowment of the Arts is so important. It enables those ventures that aren't viable commercially to be done. — David Selby

When you write about the people you hate the most, do it with love. — Hubert Selby Jr.

I guess it could be said that the inspiration for 'Requiem for a Dream' is watching the American dream not only destroy so many lives in the U.S., but infect the rest of the world with its obsession with getting more, ignoring the deadly effect that has on the planet. — Hubert Selby Jr.

If Carlos and I were books, he'd be a Nietzsche book, and I'd be a Hubert Selby book - totally different mindsets. But musically, it all fell right into place. — Sam Fogarino

Procrastination is, hands down, our favorite form of self-sabotage. — Alyce Cornyn-Selby

Oh I am trying to remember, we would read the script after we did the show. — David Selby

The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr ... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode. — Jerry Stahl

Right right, because up to that point I had not been a viewer, and I didn't know alot about the show, it was all new to me and the cast members were wonderful! — David Selby

You know ... the wonderful thing about Dark Shadows, the thing about going and looking back at it. It was so sucsessful at creating its own world. — David Selby

There are authors I truly enjoy to read, like John Irving and Don Delillo and Vollman and Hubert Selby Jr. and Hunter S. Thompson. And then there are writers that, while I enjoy their work, I read as a challenge to myself, to sharpen my knives, like Goethe or Genet or Faulkner or Joyce or Salinger. And I have a terrible weakness for music biographies. They are the best books to take on the road. I don't even have to like the band to enjoy the book. Want a wonderful literary anecdote? And watch your toes, because I'm dropping names like bricks. My favorite book of all time is Among The Dead by Michael Tolkin. Wonderful, dark, funny book. — Sammy Winston

But to believe that getting stuff is the purpose and aim of life is madness. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Self-sabotage is when we say we want something and then go about making sure it doesn't happen. — Alyce Cornyn-Selby

I never found it frustrating not speaking. — David Selby

Usually the space was dotted with people getting high, getting higher, or wondering why they werent high yet. — Hubert Selby Jr.

I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer. — Hubert Selby Jr.

The only thing I wish I had kept were all the peace beads, because in the 1960s people made these and hung them at protests and it was a wonderful thing. — David Selby

We would change out of costume, then we would read the next days script. — David Selby

One of the reasons I think Dark Shadows still runs is that it's dependent on nothing else other than a story. — David Selby

The movie, if I recall, didn't have to do with the television show because there were concerns from everyone that they didn't want it to be like the TV show. — David Selby

And I haven't met too many actors along the way that haven't told me how much the show has meant to them. It's one of the reasons they say they are doing what they're doing, today. — David Selby

A perfect method of adding drama to life is to wait until the deadline looms large. — Alyce Cornyn-Selby

We have to provide good teachers, good environment, community involvement with schools. — David Selby

The thing of it is though that's the only way people know you, they see you in that roll and they see you in person and they only know the perception of what you are. — David Selby

I've always been inspired by Genet, Henry Miller and Hubert Selby, Jr., who taught me that you've got to tell a bigger truth in whatever you're doing, but the truth is not popular. — Lydia Lunch

Death by a blow or just by the fall?" asked Detective Zach, who was standing beside me at the accident site. "Do you have maybe an X-ray machine with you?" I replied angrily. "After all, I would be grateful if I could have your finding today," said Zach. — Scott Andrew Selby

And it was so special, and to tell you the truth that's how I feel about the whole thing, I mean when I meet someone that has watched the show, and it has brought such joy to them, it just makes you feel so good. — David Selby

Like if youre beautiful you dont feel pain or have dreams or know the despair of loneliness. Why should you be unhappy, youre so beautiful? My God they drive me nuts, like all I am is a beautiful body and nothing else. Not once, never, have they ever tried to love the real me, to love me for what I am, to love me for my mind. — Hubert Selby Jr.

However they may have felt when they left they were now committed, they had passed the point of no return. — Hubert Selby Jr.

The voice so filled with nostalgia that you could almost see the memories floating through the blue smoke, memories not only of music and joy and youth, but perhaps, of dreams. They listened to the music, each hearing it in his own way, feeling relaxed and a part of the music, a part of each other, and almost a part of the world. — Hubert Selby Jr.

It/ll be better tomorrow... — Hubert Selby Jr.

Time has to pass. But sometimes its so goddamn long. Sometimes it just seems to drag and drag and weigh a ton. And hang on you like a monkey. Like its going to suck the blood out of you. Or squeeze your guts out. And sometimes it flies. And is gone somewhere, somehow, before you know it was even here. As if time is only here to make you miserable. That's the only reason for time. To squeeze you. Crush you. To tie you up in knots and make you fucking miserable. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Since 2015, the media and the public have paid more attention than ever before to the use of deadly force by American police officers. That's a great thing. The more questions the public asks, the more the public demands police produce believable, transparent evidence that they are treating people fairly, the better off our nation will become. You will see how true this is throughout this book, but until 2015, not many Americans had noticed that the data gathering done by the government on this subject was, to put it mildly, really bad. — Nick Selby

The natives knew better than to screw around with Tarzan. He was one bad dude. Lions, rhinos, just him and his knife. Great penthouse and elevator. Wouldnt last long in Brooklyn. Busted for indecent exposure. Me Tarzan you Judge. That is absolutely correct, and you are going to do sixty days. Try dressing as Beau Brummel the next time. Next case! — Hubert Selby Jr.

It was a nice night. A pleasant evening. There seemed to be stars somewhere and it was easy to avoid stepping in the garbage and dog shit on the streets. A truly beautiful night. Tony — Hubert Selby Jr.

Being an artist doesn't take much. Just everything you got. Which means of course that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it's no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it completely, I transcend all this gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission. — Hubert Selby Jr.

But you cant shut everyone out. I mean you have to have someone to love ... someone to hold on to ... someone
— Hubert Selby Jr.

And yet there was not a definable thought in his mind. Only a terrifying effort to get from one side of a match box to another. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Obviously, I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting. — Hubert Selby Jr.

The enemy ate away at their will so they could not resist, their bodies not only craving, but needing the very poison that ground them into that pitiable state of being; the mind diseased and crippled by the enemy it was obsessed with and the obsession and terrible physical need corrupting the soul until the actions were less than those of an animal, less than those of a wounded animal, less than those of anything and everything they did not want to be. — Hubert Selby Jr.

An extraordinary writer ... It is the vastness of Nick Tosches' heart that makes it possible to reveal the darkness. — Hubert Selby Jr.

I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life. — Hubert Selby Jr.

He didnt know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time comprehend. — Hubert Selby Jr.

I do believe that LAST EXIT is a microcosm and that everything in the world exists within each of us which is what makes it possible for us to identify with each other, if we have the honesty and courage, and eventually realize and accept that separation is a lie and that there is only ONE LIFE and we are all that life ... EVERYTHING. — Hubert Selby Jr.

I think the function of suffering is to let me know that my perception is skewed; what I'm doing is judging natural events in such a way that I am creating suffering within myself. For instance, you have pain over certain conditions, certain situations that occur. And if you just say 'ok, here I am, I'm going to experience the pain,' you don't suffer. The resistance and the degree of the resistance to the natural phenomenon of life causes tremendous suffering. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Sometimes it seems to stand still. Like you're in a bag and you can't get out and somebody's always telling you that it will get better with time and time just seems to stand still and laugh at you and your pain. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Here I had a strange idea not unworthy of de Selby. Why was Joe so disturbed at the suggestion that he had a body? What if he had a body? A body with another body inside it in turn, thousands of such bodies within each other like the skins of an onion, receding to some unimaginable ultimum? Was I in turn merely a link in a vast sequence of imponderable beings, the world I knew merely the interior of the being whose inner voice I myself was? Who or what was the core and what monster in what world was the final uncontained colossus? God? Nothing? Was I receiving these wild thoughts from Lower Down or were they brewing newly in me to be transmitted Higher Up? — Flann O'Brien

The responsibility of the artist is to transcend the human ego. — Hubert Selby Jr.

The summer sun continued to rise in the sky and propel shocks of heat down on the city and the heavy moisture moistened bodies and clothing, and people fanned and wiped at sweating faces trying to survive another bitch of a day as Harry and Marion peacefully passed the day sleeping in each others arms oblivious to the reality surrounding them. — Hubert Selby Jr.

But I had no idea that they were going to pull the plug so quickly. — David Selby

When I was younger I decided I'd hop on the train to New York. — David Selby

The movie wasn't really derived from Dark Shadows - they developed a whole new script for that particular one. — David Selby

Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel. — Hubert Selby Jr.

There are a lot of people in this country who really like my writing. And a lot of writers respect me. But the so-called establishment? They hate me. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Writing, like any art, is a continuing process of discovering the infinite possibilities of Life. — Hubert Selby Jr.

I guess we're kindred souls and that's why we can feel so close to each other. — Hubert Selby Jr.

And the night was comfortably warm as the soft filtered light continued to push the darkness into the shadows as they held each other and kissed and pushed each others darkness into the corner, believing in each others light, each others dream. — Hubert Selby Jr.

All I could think of was we were about to start filming for the last final weeks of the TV show and here I am in the hospital, so I missed the final weeks, and a couple days later, sore stomach and all I got on the horse we started filming. — David Selby

Procrastination is the grave in which opportunity is buried. — Alyce Cornyn-Selby

This benign property of his prose is not, one hopes, to be attributed to the reason noticed by the eccentric du Garbandier, who said 'the beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest'. — Flann O'Brien

I suspect there will never be a requiem for a dream, simply because it will destroy us before we have the opportunity to mourn it's passing. — Hubert Selby Jr.

It seems to me that we all have a dream of our own, our own personal vision, our own individual way of giving, but for many reasons we are afraid to pursue it, or to even recognize and accept its existence. But to deny our vision is to sell our soul. — Hubert Selby Jr.

They came close. Oh they came close. Was all set to put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger. But there was a computer glitch. Isnt that something? A stupid glitch and I had to wait a few days and then I saw the errors of my ways, saw so clearly that I was killing the wrong person. Its not me that needs killing, its them. Funny how things can change in the wink of an eye. — Hubert Selby Jr.

I have rituals for cleaning out resentments, disappointments, heartbreak, depression and for work. One of the things I do is go over old stuff if I have been unable to write for a while. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Thus it is awkward to call motion-sickness a migraine attack, but we may very conveniently term it a migranoid reaction, and note, in support of its affinities, that a large minority (almost 50 per cent, according to Selby and Lance) of adult migraine sufferers experienced severe motion-sickness in — Oliver Sacks

I was delighted to have lines when they came - learning lines for film isn't a problem, but television is a little different, because we shot those shows the whole way through. — David Selby

No matter how beautiful the outside may be, the inside still has feelings and needs that just words don't fulfill. — Hubert Selby Jr.

On a cold, fretful afternoon in early October, 1872, a hansom cab drew up outside the offices of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents, in the financial heart of London, and a young girl got out and paid the driver.
She was a person of sixteen or so
alone, and uncommonly pretty. She was slender and pale, and dressed in mourning, with a black bonnet under which she tucked back a straying twist of blond hair that the wind had teased loose. She had unusually dark brown eyes for one so fair. Her name was Sally Lockhart; and within fifteen minutes, she was going to kill a man. — Philip Pullman

The small Greek city-states could not understand what the organisation of a great empire and the movement of many thousands of men entailed: they themselves thought in terms of hundreds or at the most a few thousands. It would be well over a century until a Greece, unified under Alexander the Great, would have to tackle the problems of Empire. — Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford

I need more than the streets. I don't want to be a floating crap game all my life. I want to be something ... anything. — Hubert Selby Jr.

For weeks Tyrone thought he was going to die any minute, and there were also times when he was afraid he wasnt going to die. — Hubert Selby Jr.

I don't think they knew exactly where they were going with the character, but they lay those stories out ahead of time, so they had some idea where they wanted it to go. — David Selby

This book is dedicated, with love, to Bobby, who has found the only pound of pure- Faith in a Loving God. — Hubert Selby Jr.

I've always felt alienated. I realized that I've been terrified my entire life. So I can identify that fear which drives so many of the people that I write about. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Help me. Please, help me. If you really exist, you skinny jew bastard, help me kill myself. — Hubert Selby Jr.

I think family is very important in West Virginia and has long been so because the mountains made travel difficult in the past, and family members had to depend on each other. — David Selby

One of the things I have become aware of through the years is how much I love the people I write about. — Hubert Selby Jr.

our spiritual aim is not to retreat once or twice a day for meditation, but to learn how to live every moment of our lives in touch with our spiritual core. — John Selby

De Selby likens the position of a human on the earth to that of a man on a tight-wire who must continue walking along the wire or perish, being, however, free in all other respects. Movement in this restricted orbit results in the permanent hallucination known conventionally as 'life' with its innumerable concomitant limitations, afflictions and anomalies. — Flann O'Brien

an event of such prodigious proportions and importance that it infused her with a new will to live and materialized a dream that brightened her days and soothed her lonely nights. — Hubert Selby Jr.

The bodies went back in the doors and bars and the heads in the windows. The cops drove away and Freddy and the guys went back into the Greeks and the street was quiet, just the sound of a tug and an occasional car; and even the blood couldn't be seen from a few feet away. — Hubert Selby Jr.

They luxuriated in the feeling of deep and all pervading satisfaction, a feeling of knowing absolutely that all was well with the world and them and that the world was not only their oyster it was also their linguine with clam sauce. Not only were all things possible, but all things were theirs. — Hubert Selby Jr.

I think I am the most impressed with writing styles that defy category, like Kharms or Selby, Breton or Jarry, where you become as interested in the writer as much as the writing itself. It's all these things that make reading so appealing to me. — Henry Rollins

I did a lot of personal appearances because I was under contract to ABC. — David Selby

There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then preform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and moon. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Writing is a lonely are at times, we spend so much of our time locked in a room and never know if we are reaching anyone ... — Hubert Selby Jr.

I started to die 36 hours before I was born, so dying was a way of life for me. — Hubert Selby Jr.

You want to build something what's been tore down, choose a woman. You want to tear something down, choose a man. — Adrian Selby

All the energy of their frustration and fear going into their laughter. — Hubert Selby Jr.

My writing is inspired by just about everything, yet I am unaware of so much of the process. — Hubert Selby Jr.