"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."

"The world is the mirror of myself dying."

"The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks."

"Sin, guilt, neurosis; they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge."

"One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one."

"Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip."

"To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in."

"The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts."

"There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him."

"Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything except his own nature."

"Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur."

"The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself."

"Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense."

"An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness."

"The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens."

"I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth."

"Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang's feeble imagination."

"Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'"

"The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death."

"Actors die so loud."

"Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed."

"Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself."

"What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature."

"In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other."

"Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire."

"The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition."

"The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over."

"The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference."

"The concert is a polite form of self induced torture."

"The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love."

"The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon."

"Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness."

"When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently."

"Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such."

"Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring."

"The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them."

"It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd."

"I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots."

"In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor."

"The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order."

"The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive."

"We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only."

"Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane."

"Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement."

"Life is 440 horsepower in a 2-cylinder engine."

"Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race."

"Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."

"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance."

"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive."

"Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern."