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Perfection is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If you are a perfectionist, at least stop telling everybody you're one and try to get over it yourself, alone in your home with the lights off

Augusten Burroughs

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Augusten Burroughs
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: October 23
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Alone
Originality
Light
Lights
Home
Perfection
Trying
Telling
Casket
Creativity
Caskets
Least
Satin
Stop
Lined
Everybody
Perfectionist

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I always tried to learn Greek, but all I got out of it was, poulaki mou. [My little chicken.]
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I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water.
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The most valuable moments and experiences that life has to offer are found only along its most treacherous paths.
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Do not wait for the healing to arrive. It will never come. The holes will never leave or be filled with anything at all. But holes are interesting things.
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There is no shame in being hungry for another person. There is no shame in wanting very much to share your life with somebody.
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It's weird - sort of not terribly wise - to take a book that was successful and then change its cover.
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The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
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Miracles do happen. You must believe this. No matter what else you believe about life, you must believe in miracles.
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The dark side of blogging is, of course, people can be (and are) just savage and uncivilized, deeply cruel and fully unaccountable.
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Childhood is what ended me up in the hospital and teetering on the edge of deathly alcoholism. It was really good for me to accept it. To accept all the embarrassment and the shame so I don't feel like I used to.
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My brother was born without taste or the desire to be professionally lit.
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When I first thought of being a writer I had visions of stacks of books in stores with my name on them, that sort of thing. But I never imagined this would be the reaction.
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The truth about not having everything you need, not being fully equipped or qualified or allowed is that these limits are the nebula of creative genius. When you have total freedom i.e: no limits at all. You stop trying to make the best of things
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We haven't slept together. But we've napped
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There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.
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When people meet me, many times they're very surprised because they expect someone who is kind of wacky with seven piercings and very hip and cool and New York City, and I'm not.
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I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not.
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My only ritual is to just sit down and write, write every day.
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To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I'd never seen anything like them. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be one of them or simply live among them taking notes and photographs.
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I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it.
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