Hubert Selby Jr. Quotes

Only by confronting your demons can you ever hope to conquer them.

What the Man-Moth fears most he must do.

Until we have met the monsters in ourselves, we keep trying to slay them in the outer world. And we find that we cannot. For all darkness in the world stems from darkness in the heart. And it is there that we must do our work.

Shedding off one more layer of skin, Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within.

Because she was raw and uncertain, and she liked to keep all the messy parts of herself to herself. ... As much as Lena liked to hide the mess and display the finished product, by this point she was all mess and no product.

...one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.

When I face myself, I go, "You have a fear of really being on your own. So you know what? That's what we're gonna do right now.

My soul is not a palace of the past.

The more devils we have within us, the more chance we have to form angels.

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

Sometimes you have to confront your demons and sometimes even let them loose to genuinely find a place where you can gain some understanding.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world.

A lot of the time, I write in the third person, but I'm mostly describing my own ordeals. When those unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get free, you must defeat your ghosts.

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.

I feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, which is both settling and terrifying. The roller coaster is going, and there is no jumping off at this point unless I just go nuclear. It's a really interesting part of the whole journey.

I did a lot of struggling with my identity trying to figure out who the heck I was. I had to face my demons.

Everyone is battling something emotional behind closed doors - that's life.

A conscience is a troublesome thing at times. I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning and I spent the time feeling what a nothing I was, and wishing I was so very different. Then the morning's post brought me a letter from a friend, saying I was so this, so that - it made me really cry, I was so grateful.

Sometimes you have to face up to your fears to realize that they aren't actually real.

In fact, when I finally realized I was really going to write, when I was about thirty-four, I was working on my Ph.D. in Mathematics. I was just about to earn my Master's along the way, but I knew something was wrong because I found myself crying all the time.

During those formative times, I really didn't know what was going on, and I was sort of torn in a thousand different directions with how I felt about what I was doing.

The thing that bubbles up the most when I'm around other people is that I feel a joy of being alive. But I also am a very sensitive person and have many heavier feelings. It can be tiresome after a while to only do comedy, especially after you grow as a person. It starts to feel like you're playing an older version of yourself.

Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.

We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.

My whole life, I had thought that my story was, again and again: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved. But really, the story was: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his fear ate him alive.