At last, some hope

That impulse toward propitious self-destruction:

 Exactly, and then you can say, If I hadn’t done this gram of coke I wouldn’t be a maniac, but it’s because you’re a maniac that you have. You can reverse the order of cause and effect and materialize your emotions. Those are very great advantages. And you commit suicide slowly instead of making the perhaps nauseating decision to do it totally. So drugs are great—drugs were great for me—in slowing down the act of suicide. In fact I think I’m alive today thanks to being an intravenous drug addict.

And of dead fathers neglecting to leave in their wills what they couldn’t help but devise in their genes:

he’s clearly a sadistic individual, and he takes advantage of some of the props that the world has lent him in order to aestheticize his existence, and reject what Americans call a can-do spirit. Not that it’s a can’t-do spirit—I don’t think any culture admires pure incompetence—more a won’t-do spirit. It shows that you could do, but then you refuse. Why? It’s a sort of decadence, the last withered leaf of an idea of effortless brilliance. Why worship a thing that doesn’t exist anyway? There isn’t such a thing as effortless brilliance, so there’s a cunning exploitation of things like that in order to cover the fecklessness.