Donald Ray Pollock Quotes

Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It's still better than high school.

It's one thing to see the suffering and dying on the television screen and quite another to be there and experience it. You cannot look into the eyes of a starving child and yourself remain the same.

Although I think I'm relatively happy as a person, I think there's something unhappy at the root of all my writing. I'd say optimistic but unhappy. Nothing that's particularly original, other than that we're going to live and die, and terrible things happen.

To live is to be haunted.

After so many deaths I live and write.

I seem to be the only person in the world who doesn't mind being pitied. If you love me, pity me. The human state is pitiable: born to die, capable of so much, accomplishing so little; killing instead of creating, destroying instead of building, hating instead of loving. Pitiful, pitiful.

I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth

We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.

Be near me when my light is low... And all the wheels of being slow.

I saw my own blood and I thought, how could I live in a world where this exists- where love can become death?

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads... The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.

For we are born in other's pain, and perish in our own.

Life is an incurable disease.

When you see a 14-year-old boy who has never known what peace looks like for a day in his life, there's part of you as a human being that feels some degree, you can say, compassion for the fact that these boys have known war, famine, violence and death from the day they were born.

My biggest fear in life is losing the people I love, and the thing with cancer is that it seems that you can't really control it.

Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer. You're gay, you're sick, you're nervous or whatever.

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.

I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.

I am profoundly fascinated by cruelty, fear, horror and death. My films show my preoccupation with violence, the pathology of violence.

I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it's the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.