Notes to Self

Some aphorisms on life and purpose and their lack

Over the last twenty years of writing fiction and essays I’ve kept notes, more for my sanity than with any project in mind. I use them as little flags inserted into moments in time, to guide me.

Over this time period I’ve absorbed many aphorisms, epigrams, witticisms and maxims from Cioran, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Parker and Wilde and I’ve found that re-reading them and mulling over them, helps give clarity and can be useful in any number of contexts - especially when I find myself stuck with nothing to say.

As my ninth novel is about to be published and the pages of “notes to myself” have filled two A4 notebooks, I’ve decided to share a small selection. I hope these might in turn might be of some use to others.

Enjoy.

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One of the benefits of procrastination is that you will never become a tyrant.

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Be wary of those who want to appear to be bigger fish by making the pond smaller.

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People work within broken systems, but keep quiet about it, so that they can keep their jobs. For the sake of this meagre security, they perpetuate the broken system, hiding the evidence of its brokenness, and contributing daily to its mounting dysfunction. In this way cover-ups become an aggressive force that overtake and eventually destroy organisations.

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If lack of meaning drives us to kill ourselves, does it not follow that finding meaning is what we should live for.

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Who dies with all their projects complete? Their ambitions fulfilled? How many of us die halfway through completing that book, before finishing the repair of the roof, midway through fixing the car, or writing a song, or hammering a nail into a wall to hang a picture. The mechanics tools fall from their hands, the dancer dies in the middle of a warm-up exercise. Who perishes with all their projects completed? Only the one who has no projects, and who instead sits waiting for death.

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Social engineers despise eccentrics. Eccentrics are the pieces of organic matter that get caught in the cogs of the vast machine. Either they are ground down to nothing or they destroy the entire mechanism.

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The thought of the young - someone is to blame for all that limits me.
The thought of the old - I am to blame for having blamed others for my own limitations.

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Just because a poet is persecuted and banned, doesn’t make their poems any better.

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A life in irony. Oh, it was fun when it lasted, tearing down other people’s values, mocking society, but when you have negated everything, and negate everything you must, you find yourself destroying the very ground upon which you stand, clinging then, to the rubble for fear of falling into a void of your own making. How can you - the brave nihilist who has demolished all meaning and value - then know that you have integrity, or that you have done good or evil, for there is no ground left on which to make such judgements. Everything is equal and everything has fallen into a hole beneath your feet. How can you know if you have sold out, or been hypocritical, or achieved anything. What is to stop you then from committing violent or desperate acts to stop yourself falling into the hole? As they say, if you stand for nothing, you might fall for anything.

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We tread a narrow path between destroying our illusions and falling into disillusionment.

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Freedom is relative, not absolute. People don't want to be free in a universal sense.

What does this useless abstraction mean anyway? They want to be more free than very specific others. More free than those who they feel have stolen their freedom from them. More free than their owners, their masters, their superiors, their bosses. Rousseau was wrong, freedom always demands that others must be in chains.

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Those who preach equality with resentment in their hearts, secretly want all to suffer equally.

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Which comforting lie shall I tell myself about the world today?

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In fiction and in politics, beware of all those who reverse-engineer their stories to fit a fore-drawn solution. In fiction, this always results in bad plotting; in politics it always results in despotism.

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Let us talk, for once, of outcomes. Of all the things that never turned out the way we planned, of all those high hopes that turned into unintended consequences. Let us no longer hide the outcomes beneath the re-telling of our good intentions. Let us no longer hide the bodies and distract the onlookers with a firework display announcing that we will try harder next time, embarking on you even greater displays of even higher and more pure intentions. Let us admit where the hidden graves are. Let us ask for forgiveness and let our failure be a lesson to those who come after us, rather than a curse upon the young who will not be able to learn from our mistakes because we have concealed them.

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You are the only person you know who will not be affected by your own death.

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Most poets would do a lot better if they just focused on being alcoholics.

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As a writer you have two options: You can smear the walls with your shit and scream, “let me out of this prison”. Or you can paint images in your shit of distant lands and other times.

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Free thinkers pose a structural threat to any institution. As when there is corruption, entropy or systemic failure, free thinkers have a tendency to talk openly about such things in the naïve belief that they can be fixed, rather than simply doing what all the corrupt, failing, entropic people in that institution spend half their working lives doing: namingly, hiding the evidence of their own and each other’s corruption, entropy or systemic failure. This is why free and original thinkers are rarely employed within institutions.

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Diagnosis of a proto-totalitarian: someone who believes that they are more egalitarian than everyone else; who believes that they alone know exactly what the world needs; that the voice in their head is the voice of the people.

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Another date for the Armageddon passes us by and life goes on, but rather than learn from this error, rather than question this narrative that Western civilisation seems so dependent upon, we simply shop around for our next impending apocalypse. After so many failed predictions over so many years, we ultimately must ask, why are we so dependent on this recurring narrative that tells us the world is about to end. What does this story do for us, in a positive sense, as individuals and as a culture? Are we so tired, lazy and disillusioned that only the promise of an impending apocalypse will rouse us from our beds?

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Why write? So that after I am dead I can be better company for the living.

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While success tends to go to the head, failure tends to rest in the digestive system.

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Utopianism is for young people who know nothing about history, and for old people who try to deny the reality of history.

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There might be one good thing out there to fight for, rather than a hundred things to fight against.

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My new novel: FOR EMMA, is published by Leamington Books in the UK, on 25.03.25, and by Arcade Publishing in the USA on 17.06.25.