"I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions."

"My poems are only bits of scratchingon the floor of acage."

"I have one problem, I don't hate people. They disgust me and I want to get away from them. I do not have hatred. I have an escape mechanism."

"The tired sunsets and the tired people - it takes a lifetime to die and no time at all."

"I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get."

"And love is a word usedtoo much andmuchtoo soon."

"What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability."

"...they would say 'he said this, he did that', but they would never say 'she said this, she did that'. So I would say, they are sick, and I am well. Pardon me."

"When I get down to my last dime I'll just walk over to skid row.""There are some real weirdos down there.""They're everywhere."

"A life can change in a tenth ofa second.or sometimes it can take70years."

"People see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin."

"If I never see you again I will always carry youinsideoutsideon my fingertipsand at brain edgesand in centerscentersof what I am ofwhat remains."

"I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you."

"For meobedience to another is the decayof self."

"Poetry is what happens when nothing else can."

"Where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die."

"Like anybody can tell you, I am not a very nice man. I don't know the word. I have always admired the villain, the outlaw, the son of a bitch. I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions. I also like vile women, drunk cursing bitches with loose stockings and sloppy mascara faces. I'm more interested in perverts than saints. I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society."

"It wasn't my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it."

"I'm not dead yet, just in a state of rapid decay, who isn't?"

"Hell, I'd even failed with women. Three wives. Nothing really wrong each time. It all got destroyed by petty bickering. Railing about nothing. Getting pissed-off over anything and everything. Day by day, year by year, grinding. Instead of helping each other you just sliced away, picked at this or that. Goading. Endless goading. It became a cheap contest. And once you got into it, it became habitual. You couldn't seem to get out. You almost didn't want to get out. And then you did get out. All the way."

"The lies of centuries, the lies of love,the lies of Socrates and Blake and Christwill be your bedmates and tombstonesin a death that will never end."

"The Laughing Heartyour life is your lifedon't let it be clubbed into dank submission.be on the watch.there are ways out.there is a light somewhere.it may not be much light butit beats the darkness.be on the watch.the gods will offer you chances.know them.take them.you can't beat death butyou can beat death in life, sometimes.and the more often you learn to do it,the more light there will be.your life is your life.know it while you have it.you are marvelousthe gods wait to delightin you."

"People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way."

"In this land some of us fuck more than we die but most of us die better than we fuck."

"The old gal was only another lonely creature in a world that didn't care."

"The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing."

"To me, nudity is a joke. I don't think nude people are very attractive at all. I like my women fully clothed. I like to imagine what might be under there. It might not be the standard thing. Imagine, stripping a woman down, and she has a body like a little submarine. With periscope, propellers, torpedoes. That would be the one for me. I'd marry her right off and be faithful to the end."

"I went to the kitchen and felt-up the turkey."

"That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man."

"Great books are the ones we need."

"Only the poor knew the meaning of life, the rich and the safe had to guess."

"Most so-called brave people lack imagination. As though they can't conceive of what would happen if something went wrong. The truly brave overcome their imagination and do what they have to do."

"Sometimes a man must fight so hard for life that he doesn't have time to live it."

"There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the outwardly beautiful and inwardly cold were necessary. The kinder ones fucked better, really, and after you were around them a while they seemed beautiful because they were."

"In the most decent sometimes sun there is the softsmoke feeling from urns and the canned sound of old battleplanes and if you go inside and run your finger along the window ledge you'll find dirt, maybe even earth. and if you look out the window there will be the day, and as you get older you'll keep looking keep looking sucking your tongue in a little ah ah no no maybe some do it naturally some obscenely everywhere."

"She wasn't veryinterestingbut few peopleare."

"There is always somebody about to ruin your day, if not your life."

"The secret is writing down one simple line after another."

"I didn't know if I was unhappy. I felt too miserable to be unhappy."

"People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice."

"We are burning like a chicken wing left on the grill of an outdoor barbecuewe are unwanted and burning we are burning and unwanted we arean unwantedburningas we sizzle and fryto the bonethe coals of Dante's 'Inferno' spit and sputter beneathus andabove the sky is an open hand andthe words of wise men are uselessit's not a nice world, a nice world it's not ..."

"And then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw."

"Walking out with the people, I didn't know which was more exciting, the air race, the parachute jump that failed, or the cunt."

"There is enough treachery , hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day."

"Are there good governments and bad governments? No, there are only bad governments and worse governments."

"The Artist," an ancient sage had once said, "is always sitting on the doorsteps of the rich."

"The cat is the beautiful devil."

"He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge."

"If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose."

"When Whitman wrote, "I sing the body electric," I know what he meant I know what he wanted:to be completely alive every moment in spite of the inevitable.we can't cheat death but we can make it work so hard that when it does take us it will have known a victory just as perfect as ours."