“Everything is more complicated
than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million
little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life
every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may
never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out.
Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but
there is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and
eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your
time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain,
wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something
to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn't really.
And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good
will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you
feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry,
and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking
hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just
to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about
my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.”
-
Charlie
Kaufmann, Synecdoche New York
“Why
do I feel depressed whenever I'm not working?”
“I hope I'm not so miserable making another video ever
again.”
“I'm so tired and burnt from filming, I can barely breathe
or talk”
“I need some exercise, I have the feeling it will really
help”
“Synecdoche New York: Saddest
movie ever made Period”
“am i overexerting myself by continuing to masturbate?”
“I don't think about a plan when I masturbate twice a day
right? That should be my mindset for every other thing”
“I masturbate so much, I don't even like girls anymore”
“Am I not being honest with myself with what I want to do?
“Another bout of insecurity again, always happens when I
become sick”
“We're not supposed to hide from our past, but make sense of
it”
“be honest with yourself. Always”
-
Amos Yee
“Do I have an original thought in
my head? My bald head. Maybe if I were happier my hair wouldn't be falling out.
Life is short. I need to make the most of it. Today is the first day of the
rest of my life. I'm a walking cliché. I really need to go to the doctor and
have my leg checked. There's something wrong. A bump. The dentist called again.
I'm way overdue. If I stop putting things off, I would be happier. All I do is
sit on my fat ass. If my ass wasn't fat, I would be happier. I wouldn't have to
wear these shirts with the tails out all the time, like that's fooling anyone.
Fat ass. I should start jogging again. Five miles a day. Really do it this
time. Maybe rock climbing.
I need to turn my life around. What do I need to do? I need to
fall in love. I need to have a girlfriend. I need to read more and prove
myself. What if I learned Russian or something, or took up an instrument. I
could speak Chinese. I would be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese and plays
the oboe. That would be cool. I should get my hair cut short. Stop trying to
fool myself and everyone else into thinking I have a full head of hair. How
pathetic is that? Just be real. Confident. Isn't that what women are attracted
to? Men don't have to be attractive. But that's not true. Especially these
days. Almost as much pressure on men as there is on women these days. “
-
Adaptation, Charlie Kauffman
“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well
emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back
away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and
instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human
troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew
self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of
course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly
repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point.
Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels.”
-
David Foster Wallace E Unibus Pluram
“I'm wondering... Why do we tell stories? Why do people
write fiction? How do you put yourself into the mindset to tell fiction?”
“Does everyone have a shallow side to them?”
“You don't care about it. Till you researched it or
experienced it”
“When you're depressed, you can't control it, just relax”
“Being honest about your insecurities is also another option
in writing, and also very funny”
“To choose what to do, you juat have to be uncompromisingly
honest with yourself, and know yourself”
-
Amos Yee
“There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None
of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories.”
-
Charlie
Kaufmann, Synecdoche New York
“don't
watch a lars von trier movie near bed time, you'll be too shocked to sleep”
“The unrelenting cries of a baby haunts me”
“Holy moutain is just an entire movie where people do bad
things, especially to their lives, and then has a message that says embrace
life”
-
Amos Yee
“To see beauty is to see all of the ways in which we are
hopelessly adrift from it. Beauty is a kind of contrast. Beauty
comes from our lack of it. Beauty is about the fleeting moment that is
already past you as soon as you perceive it, and how we will all die. The
notion that you could ever have beauty without misery is completely
delusional. Beauty comes from misery. It comes from darkness.
It comes from the nature of life to be relentless in its pursuit to fucking
kill you. If you feel better about yourself or the world after you’ve
seen beauty–you haven’t seen beauty.
Do you know what hell is? Do you know why hell
is? The central core horror of hell is that one has been removed from the
divine and will never again behold the perfection that they have already
seen. There is no angel that understands the nature of God and the
divine, and what beauty is than Lucifer. Hell is the mind pealing prison
of the after affects of that conception. Lucifer beheld beauty so closely
that he became it for a split second, and then thought to replace it with his
singular ego–and the fall and hell, are the ramifications of that loss.
That is the primordial archetype within our culture on which the conception of
beauty rests. The truth of all of our words and ideas at their purest
state would terrify you.”
-
Sarah Horrocks, on The Counselor
“Maybe if I gain more knowledge on tarot cards, I could get
more of the holy mountain”
“The parts where the holy mountain affected me, really
influenced me”
-
Amos Yee
“We
discovered that Dali was also at the St. Regis Hotel! By chance I was reading a
book about the Tarot. And then I take a page where the Hanged Man I write, I
want to see you because
I will make a picture with you.”
“The movie has to be just like I dream it. The picture need to
be exactly as I am dreaming the picture. Is a dream. Don't change my dream.
This system make of us slaves. Without dignity. Without depth. With a devil in
our pocket. This incredible money are in the pocket. This money. This shit.
This nothing. This paper who have nothing inside. Movies have heart. Have mind.
Have power. Have ambition. I wanted to do something like that. Why not?”
-
Jodorowsky’s Dune
“The secret to great writing, is not how fluent the grammar
is, or how wide the vocabulary is, but by how the sentence sounds.”
“You have to be perceptive, and listen to the music of your
sentences, if it sounds good, it is good”
-
Amos Yee
“Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not
allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently,
it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers
that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was
first song.”
-
Jorge Luis Borges
“Never compromise. In every instance, humiliation is the
greatest and most effective method of conveying information”
“It's so childish to say I'm emotional just because I don't
agree with you“
-
Amos Yee
“It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I
don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so
tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go
bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a
different way”
-
Franny and Zooey, Salinger
““I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to
somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say
that stuff, though.”
"'It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that
you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac
some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football
team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and
everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques'"
-
Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention,
and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about
other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little
unsexy ways, every day”
-
David Foster Wallace, This is Water
“I think sometimes, the type of rest you want is just
silence”
-
Amos Yee
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”
-
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Could do movies based on each director, and finish his
oeuvre like a tv series... hmm...”
“Watching wolf of wall street gives a very effective
adrenalin rush”
“I can never make something as disneyish as gravity falls. I
wish I could. Oh well, I'll just make my own stuff, maybe it can be better”
“Gotta watch me some david fincher”
“Don't like Edgar Wright's style of comedy, but visually
he's great”
“I love fast frame edits”
“Experiment with different delivery, different styles,
different techniques. Variety adds the spice to life”
“I'm getting really fucking unnerved by over the garden
wall's atmosphere”
“Tarantino is as undisciplined as me! Fuck!!”
“As of now, I currently dislike Inherent Vice, but I really
shouldn't because it was made by Paul Thomas Anderson, he fucking made
Magnolia”
“Synecdoche, New York is in my opinion, the most
representative of that ideal. It is considered by me to be the 3rd greatest
film of all time(Yes, I find it better than Boyhood), and the most saddest,
dramatically potent film I've ever seen.”
“As an atheist, I
wouldn't dumb down the experience calling it 'religious', I prefer to deem it
as 'transcendent'.” (Comment made on opening of Magnolia)
-
Amos Yee
“What he used to make me memorize was the shots. He’d say,
“Ok, learn that movie!” – by learn that movie he meant; you sit down with a
bunch of pile of paper and pencils and write – shot for shot – the movie from
memory. I learned a bunch of movies that way. I learned 8 1/2 that way which is
a very complex film. I learned Clockwork Orange…His
notion was that if you really wanna become a filmmaker, you have to get that
conversant. You have to be able to carry that much in your mind.
If you want to be a world class musician, instrumentalist player of something;
piano, or violin or something. You’d have dozens maybe hundreds of scores,
you’d have hours of music in your mind! You’d never need to look at the piece
of paper, all those hours would be in your mind! And you couldn’t possibly be
good enough unless you had done enough work to put all that music in your mind.
So that you would just be able to sit down and call up note for note some piece
of Mozart or one of the classics of your profession. And his notion with me –
because the way he put it he just said “You have eyes, so you better learn to
use them”. Instead of thinking of movies as print – which is the way they’re
always approached; a pile of paper. It’s always the events and the words that
will be spoken. Instead of thinking of movies that way, he made me learn to
think of movies as a chain of images where you would fashion the entire chain
of images. Just like a music student could hold a concerto in his mind, you
should hold the movie in your mind; the images – nevermind the words, the
images – “Where is the camera for that shot. What kind of lens was it? What was
the camera doing?” – on every shot, on every one of – well most movies have
about a thousand shots.”
“I went about it like it was reverse engineering. I knew
that I had to go and learn what a movie was, not just my experience of going
and watching a movie. So I went and sat in Truffaut’s Day for Night,
watched it for three days straight, eight hours at a time and memorized
it shot-for-shot. I got past the story, all the original and secondary
experience, so I could study what it was that I was really watching. Film
is really sort of a chain that’s really linear. Yet when it’s all strung
together, it just sort of feels like an experience. It takes quite a while to
be able to deconstruct that experience to figure out what you really saw.”
-
John McTierman on how he got into directing
“After watching the works of Charlie Kaufman, I get so
annoyed when amateur writers are completely self-indulgent and dishonest with
themselves, because it's shown so evidently in their writing, and it's
absolutely painful to read”
“Here's Charlie Kaufman, a writer that is the biggest
advocator of uncompromising honesty in one's work, and that honesty is
perfectly transcended onto the audience, until you literally feel the raw
emotional resonance of Kaufman's artistic vision”
“This scene is the closest thing any movie has ever done to
cause me to break down into tears. My fellow friends, this is the kind of drama
that people should respond to, not some sappy korean romance, or homosexual
self-indulgently cutting himself in the wrist. It's not only honest, but
completely relentless in it's honesty. If you want to see me shed tears in
person, show me this scene, and I will oblige.”
-
Amos Yee on Synecdoche, New York
“the movie helped us realize that first-rate experimentalism
was a way not to “transcend” or “rebel against” the truth but actually to honor
it. It brought home to us—via images, the medium we were suckled on and most
credulous of—that the very most important artistic communications took place at
a level that not only wasn’t intellectual but wasn’t even fully conscious, that
the unconscious’s true medium wasn’t verbal but imagistic, and that whether the
images were Realistic or Postmodern or Expressionistic or Surreal or
what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they felt true, whether they
rang psychic cherries in the communicate”
-
David Foster Wallace on David Lynch
“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are
mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn
like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
-
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“And you look out in the sunset on the far distance of the
horizon, and you acknowledge that there are so many great things in this world,
so many treasures, and gems, and discoveries, waiting to be experienced…”
-
Amos Yee
“I don't think hammering a rock like him would shape it
well.
This guy will just shatter to little pieces.
Something about his mindset is just completely off to me.
Yes, he is intelligent, but his people skill and reasoning is brimming with terrible self-justifying venom.”
This guy will just shatter to little pieces.
Something about his mindset is just completely off to me.
Yes, he is intelligent, but his people skill and reasoning is brimming with terrible self-justifying venom.”
-
Online Comment
“Now his smiling face is plastered all over BBC and ABC
news, while only a day before they were covering LKY's funeral, they are now
seeing Singapore being petty and vengeful as it brings the lese-majeste hammer
down on a kid who in most 1st World countries wont be able to drink, smoke or
have sex. He has managed to do what Roy Ngerng and the other failed to, garner
international attention.”
-
Online Comment
“Amos Yee is an out of order robot”
-
Online Comment
“It has nothing to do with
intelligence but just a desire to have the limelight and see how far he can
take his crap. He doesn't care about making the world better, he just doesn't”
-
Online comment
“instead of enjoying his
childhood and just being an innocent boy, he had to dabble in the adult world,
trying to grow up too fast. this can never be good. Sigh! The adult world is a
shitty one that adults can't get out of. he wasted his youth trying to jump
into this adult world too early. wasted life.”
-
Online Comment
“He comes across as someone who would
do a gun shooting in a school.”
-
Online Comment
“It is very obvious to me that
Amos Yee is suffering from a form of high functioning autism and Asperger
syndrome, characterized by his lack of ability to integrate into society, form
friendships, and general lack of empathy.”
-
Online Comment
“Can we just stop trying to
psychoanalyse Amos Yee? He's a very bright and outspoken boy, and there's no
need to go into how he must be so isolated, or that he's sociopathic, or that
he's famished for attention.
-
Alfian Sa’at
“An insecure teenager. Wannabe
anti-establishment hipster nerd. I don't think he feels loved by his parents,
probably a lonely child. Don't quote me for truth, is not a professional
profiler.”
-
Online Comment
“Don't let his big words and
annoying western accent trick you into thinking that he's intelligent.”
-
Online Comment
“at the end of the day, we look
at his journey has having ended in the trash bin of history but the fact is
writers / film makers / poets etc all thrive for moments like this, where they
represent the vox populi against the hegemon on the battlefields of popular
culture even for a split second. his happens to have resulted in an arrest and
probably a jail term, again, not an unique narrative in the grand scheme of
things.”
-
Online Comment
“Trust me his journey has not
ended yet. It's barely started. He still has a long way to go, and lots to
learn. He can go on and YouTube his way to doom, or if this episode knocked a
little sense into him he will start doing something else, hopefully productive,
and eventually find his way to success and be a positive contributor to society
just like everybody else. He first needs to find meaning in what he do, and the
reason for him being so utterly random, full of **** and rebellious is because
he has found neither meaning nor approval for what he has done.”
-
Online Comment
“What is the meaning of Life?”
-
Amos Yee
“What Amos Yee said about people living
life for popularity and are generally conformists is also very consistent with
and well documented by human psychology studies.
Non-conformist is ostracized by the majority/society because not conforming to what the majority thinks is judged to be "wrong".”
Non-conformist is ostracized by the majority/society because not conforming to what the majority thinks is judged to be "wrong".”
-
Online Comment
“This leads me to just one
conclusion: Amos Yee reminds me a lot of a good friend of mine, Alvin Tan. Both
of them are intelligent but hated life in Singapore. To a certain degree, Amos
even reminds me of a younger version of myself when I was a JC student, growing
up in Singapore. But then again, I chose the path of least resistance. Yes
I was like Amos Yee back in the day - I didn't like things in Singapore, I
chose to leave quietly when the opportunity presented itself in the form of a
scholarship to study at a British university. No fuss, no controversy, no
problems - I quietly took my leave and got on with my life in Europe. I didn't
stay and fight for a better Singapore - but then again, I also understand how
democracy works. Change will come to Singapore when the people want it and are
ready for it and judging from what we have seen this week, nothing is going to
change in the short run or the medium term. Alvin Tan has already found his way
to America and I do keep in touch with him - life in America has been good to
him and he is busy getting on with his new life in California. Need I
state the obvious? Amos Yee should just do what we did - leave Singapore when
he is old enough to do so. In the meantime, just keep your head down and stay
out of trouble.”
-
LimpehFT’s Blog
“Every single person who has
been influential in history, advocates not being neutral, and holding their
beliefs and ideas with a strong, unmitigated passion. And they left their marks
throughout history and influenced and are still influencing millions of people.
So why wouldn’t you want to be equipped with the aspect that will make you,
like Issac Newton, Voltaire or Rene Descartes, important in life. We are a
people of opinions, we are people of ideas, we are people of modern science,
logic and intellect, and we will be able to incorporate all those aspects into
our lives and make it more exciting and happier by saying fuck you to being
neutral. Repeat that after me, fuck you to being neutral.
-
Amos Yee
“And Pilate
saith unto them, Behold the man!”
-
John 19:5
““The truth is you already know
what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of
everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you
can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of
what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet
the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those
tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to
see each other through these tiny keyholes.
But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think...The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it's only a part. Who wouldn't? It's called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it's why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali--it's not English anymore, it's not getting squeezed through any hole.
So cry all you want, I won't tell anybody.””
But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think...The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it's only a part. Who wouldn't? It's called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it's why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali--it's not English anymore, it's not getting squeezed through any hole.
So cry all you want, I won't tell anybody.””
-
David Foster Wallace
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