Don't be afraid of the world. We're just all the people you could've been.

Oh shut up. Every time it rains, it stops raining. Every time you hurt, you heal. After darkness, there is always light and you get reminded of this every morning but still you choose to believe that the night will last forever. Nothing lasts forever. Not the good or the bad. So you might as well smile while you're here.

You can sit there thinking about it for the rest of your life. That's death.

Or, you can get up and do it. That's life.

You’ll either make the choice yourself or the universe will make it for you. So there’s really nothing to worry about.

"You're not a bad person. You're a terrific person. You're my favorite person. But every once in a while, you can be a real cunt."

So Paris comes and sits down beside me, and I make her a little nervous when I tell her that she's got to listen to this song called "For You". She's afraid I'll be cross if she doesn't like it, or - even worse - that I'll be really furious if she does. I explain that the song is about a girl's fading presence, about "barroom eyes shine vacancy," about someone whose grip on life is so vague that to see her you have to look hard.

That's me, I say to Paris. I'm the girl who's lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away into the background. Just like the Cheshire Cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who looks so very vibrant and shimmery, but who is in fact soon going to be gone. When you look at that picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible, getting covered over more thickly with darkness, coats and coats of darkness that are going to suffocate me in the sweltering heat of the summer sun that I can't even see anymore, even though I can feel it burn.

Imagine, I suggest to Paris, only knowing that the sun is shining because you feel the ache of its awful heat and not because you know the joy of its light. Imagine being always in the dark.

I am going on and on this way to Paris, who is still uneasy, and is not quite sure what to say. You know, I continue, I'd be just like the girl in the song except for one thing. One thing. And that's that he says she's all he ever wanted. He loves her so much. The whole song is about how he's come to take her to the hospital to rescue her from suicide.

I start, as if on cue, to cry. I am so caught up in the idea that nobody would actually try to save me if I were to slit my wrists or hang myself from one of the rafters in the bunk. I can't believe anyone might care enough to try to keep me alive. And then I realize that, yes, of course they would, but only because it is the thing to do. It's not about true caring. It's about not wanting to live with the guilt, the insult, the ugly knowledge that a suicide took place and you did nothing.

[...]

I cry some more and go on and on about how nice it must be to have someone so in love with you they'd sing about the day you died. Paris opens her mouth, probably to say something about how people would like to help, people would like to let me know they care, they just don't know what to do, but I shut her up. I don't want to hear the company line right now. And if anyone ever loved me anough to write such a beautiful song about me, you know I wouldn't kill myself, I continue. In the end I have to think the girl in "For You" is totally crazy because she decided to die when there was so much love for her right here on earth.

"Everything's gonna be fine. Stay optimistic. If there's dark clouds coming up, they'll leave again. They always do. The world is round. Everything's round. The biggest invention of all times, the wheel is round. Things pass. Nothing will stay the same forever. No matter in how big a pile of shit you've gotten yourself - be it drugs, financial problems, fucked up relations: you'll get over it. It'll go away just like the weather. The sun is round, so is the planet we live on, marriage rings and our eyes through which we see the world."

"What about, like, when you go on holiday, think, 'Aw, I better go on holiday, cheer meself up, get away from it all. But when you go on holiday... you're there. So it's shit. You can't get away from you. 'Oh, it's me, somewhere a bit different. Great. So I'm just gonna have this, have I, until eventually death.' - 'Yep, that's pretty much the deal!' - 'Thanks. Thanks for that. Glad I signed.' - ''S too late now!'"

A Chinese emperor once dreamed he was a butterfly. From that day he was never quite sure that he wasn't really just a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese emperor.

You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

'If they only knew!' I screamed inside. 'If they only knew what I have within me. How much I can pour out, how much I have to say, how much I have inside. If they only knew!'

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, not all that Carrie teenage telekinetic wank, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze, to transform. Yet I was unwanted, rejected and unthought of. My mother, yes, she believed in me, but everybody's mother believes in them. No one else believed in me.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Life's like a ride in an amusement park. We go on it and think it's real 'cause that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question, is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride..." And we kill those people. "Shut him up. I've got a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? We let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter because, it's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. Just a choice, right now, between fear and love.The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, into a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defense each year and, instead, spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would do many times over - not one human being excluded - and we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever. In peace.

Certainly the most destructive vice, if you like, that a person can have - more than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self-pity. I think self-pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have, and the most destructive.

It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred - and I think actually hatred's a subset of self-pity, not the other way round - it destroys everything around it except itself. Self-pity will destroy relationships, it will destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophesies it makes and leave only itself.

And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is under-appreciated, and that if only one had had a chance of this or only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better. You would be happy if only this. That one is unlucky. All those things - and some of them may well even be true - but to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice.

I think it's one of these things we find unattractive about the American culture, a culture which I find mostly extremely attractive, and I like Americans and I love being in America. But just occasionally there'll be some example of the absolutely ravening self-pity that they are capable of. And you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle and it's so self-destructive. I always wanted once to publish a self-help book saying "How to be Happy" by Stephen Fry. Guaranteed success. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages and the first page would just say, "Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings." And that's what the book would be, and it would be true.

And it sounds like, "Oh, that's so simple." Because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself. It's bloody hard. Cause we do feel sorry for ourselves.

"I like being scared to death. It's brilliant. If I'm not terrified, then it's not worth doing."

You are beautiful. We are standing in sky emanating light. We breathe the same air and through your bellybutton you reach back into the dawn.

And then I walked out onto the stage for the first time in my life. The light. The light is so bright that all that remains is you and the darkness. You can feel the audience breathing. It's like holding a gun or standing on a precipice and knowing you must jump. It feels slow and fast. It's like dying and being born and fucking and crying. It's like falling in love and being utterly alone with God; you taste your own mouth and feel your own skin and I knew I was alive and I knew who I was and that that wasn't who I'd been up till then. I'd never been so far away but I knew I was home. "I know everything," I thought. I knew I'd never leave and I never have. My first lines were, "It's okay, everybody. It's okay."

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. Must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

"I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die. But there's still the rest of you. There's your breasts and your genitals... They're amazingly stupid, like babies or faithful dogs. They don't get it, they just want him. Want him."

'When I was in this centre earlier this year they asked me to do something like that. They said, "Can you draw anything?" And I just couldn't do it. I burst into tears. I was terrified. Because I felt I needed someone to tell me what it was that I should be doing, and I could work towards that. "Draw me a tree" – that's fine. "Draw anything" – I panicked.'

What's the fear there?

'Just... judged. That they were looking for something in particular and I'd give it to them.'