Conor O'Driscoll

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong.

The hero in your life is never going to be the person who pats you on the head: it’s going to be the person who puts their own need to be liked aside to make you a better designer.

Hopefully, we are more than everybody can see.

You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?” And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?

What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.

Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What’s left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.

All artforms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.

Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer.

To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.

But I remember to sense where I am. To sense my feet in the grass and the cool night on my skin. I look up at the dark line of trees and the fireflies flickering at the base of them, and the stars dimly emerging overhead and the moonlit trees all around me, and instead of jokes or stories this time I say out loud that I think this place is already heaven, and everybody in it is already an angel, and we’re here in heaven to make heaven a better place for the other angels.

I’ve come to believe that a lot of what’s wrong with the Internet has to do with memory. The Internet somehow contrives to remember too much and too little at the same time, and it maps poorly on our concepts of how memory should work.

The trick to being truly creative, I’ve always maintained, is to be completely unselfconscious. To resist the urge to self-censor. To not-give-a-shit what anybody thinks. That’s why children are so good at it. And why people with Volkswagens, and mortgages, Personal Equity Plans and matching Lois Vutton luggage are not.

Man is born crying. When he has cried enough, he dies.

The loop is a signature of our times, whether in musical beats or GIFS. The loop is repetition, over and over again in the now.

If we give the impression that creativity is the sole domain of the creative industries, why are we surprised when it is considered irrelevant to everyone else?

Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Isn’t that a beautiful description of the web?

Interviewer - Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take?
Jean Cocteau - I would take the fire.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.