Introduction...

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is." 

— Charles Bukowski 

"It is scenes such as this which explain why we all eventually devise ways of putting ourselves in places or states of feeling that bring us back to the inner rhapsody of being alive and reconnect us with the now feeling of life." - “Alma Cogan” by Gordon Burn.

"When you're on the night shift, you have to drink as much alcohol as you can stomach at around 6.15 in the morning - that's the only thing that will see you through, otherwise you might be seeing imaginary trains at 2pm in the afternoon, which make you jump unpredictably - especially, if you are a self-indulgent artist trying to get one out of a hundred solid pieces of work published by pissing them into the snow. And if you are an artist working nights, the shift illumines an unseen fact that lurks silently in the shadows during daylight - the fact that someone, somewhere, should be fucking ashamed of themselves." - "Sick Fuckers and How to Cure Them" by Craig Guthrie.