“I beg you…to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves ad if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

“I get out to Hollywood with a couple thousand bucks in my pocket. I got one movie out- Dazed & Confused, which is the only resume I have. It’s enough to get me in a few doors, but it’s not enough to be a ‘lead pipe cinch’. I need an agent and I’m in Hollywood sleeping on this guys couch- Don Phillips. I met Don at a bar in Austin over a year earlier and he gave me the chance to go audition for Dazed & Confused. I’m on his couch, my money is in the three digits, and I’m starting to get a little worried so I ask Don for an agent meeting and he snapped at me-

“Mathew! You need it too much! If this industry, Hollywood, smells need, you’re done buddy! What you need to do is get the hell out of here! Go with your buddies, ride motorcycles somewhere, hell, pick Europe I don’t care. But go somewhere until you quit needing it so much because if Hollywood smells you needing it you’re done, you’re never in.”

And I did- put my backpack on, took off with $800, and rode motorcycles through Europe with my buddies. I came back and I wasn’t even thinking about an agent. I was what Don called-

“Now you’re cool again, now you’re cool again”

I was rolling along and it was about a week later when Don told me-

“You’re ready. Tomorrow morning. Meeting. William Morris.”

I went in there, and I crushed it. Because I didn’t need it, but they needed me.”

“The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.”

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