23 Quotes by Guy Mankowski

People never fully confront their wrongdoing. They are all trying to push for their own ends, and they lack the strength to truly apologise for that. In my heart of hearts, I wondered if I was just the same.

Sam marvelled at how easily people walked off the street and into these decadent dioramas. It was spooky how easily people’s inner landscapes were expressed in enclosed booths and glittering bars. Their private nightmares slid into the moulded furniture as if it had been designed for them.

The truth is that there is no centre, no portal where all the decadence and glamour you craved opens up for you. There is just a lot of people standing about pretending they know where it is, pretending that they are part of its heart.

Culture always tells you to look to illusions for answers. ‘Look at me’, it says, ‘I’ve worked it all out’. Celebrities grow too powerful because people mistake their colour for content. They allow them to create a hole at the heart of our culture, in which they then flourish.

Where does someone’s energy go when their body is cracked open? Does it end up in the corners of all the bedrooms they visited, nestled in the hearts of everyone they knew? Do they have their own secret portals through which they come in and out of the world, where we can sometimes feel them? And if they’re an artist, does their influence go even deeper, into places inside people that they didn’t even know they had?

Something occurs to me, that you should let a man into your world on your own terms. And if you’re going to do that, then you should probably let people into your world on your own terms. And what better way to do that than through your art?

It all stings. Every humiliation just illuminates, like a row of promenade lights, all the other rejections and betrayals that snake into the darkness of your past. You only think that record deals, gigs and minor fame create a net that will hold your life because you are on the outside of the net. It doesn’t hold shit. All you have is what people are doing in the room with you now.

All of the administrative methods used in professional circles- confidentiality, whatever else is in vogue- are just tools. Tools that governing bodies can deploy, under the guise of fairness. Some of the most corrupt organisations I have worked with have the most finely developed guidelines that they work to. These guidelines gives them more rope to hang their victims.

She didn’t think that by hanging a chandelier from the ceiling you made a room with a chandelier. She felt you’d made another world, which you could slip in and out of by some vague process of application