Diary

All you need to know is this is your face. This is what you think you know best.

All the sweat and boring effort that goes into creating what looks easy and instant.

Nothing else gets your attention. While the inspiration comes, you keep going.

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

It would be that time—late at night—when your ears reach out for any sound. When you can see more with your eyes closed than open.

Grace says, “We all die.” She says, “The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”

You really shouldn’t smoke. Even if you’re already dead.

I bet if you painted what’s in your heart, it could hang in a museum.

How your head is the cave, your eyes the cave mouth. How you live inside your head and only see what you want. How you only watch the shadows and make up your own meaning.

Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.

Just for the record, today’s weather is nervous disgust with tentative apprehension.

Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.

Everything is a self-portrait. A diary.

We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

The toxic parts of oil paints: Vandyke red, ferrocyanide; iodine scarlet, mercuric iodide; flake white, lead carbonate; cobalt violet, arsenic—all those beautiful compounds and pigments that artists treasure but turn out to be deadly. How your dream to create a masterpiece will drive you nuts and then kill you.

On television, a man shouted “Te amo... Te amo...” again and again to a dark-haired girl with brown eyes and feathery long eyelashes while he kicked her down a flight of stairs.