"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."

"I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object."

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

"But you can't put fight into a man's guts if hehasn't any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that youcan't ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death.We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don't live in themoment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind."

"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."

"He's like a hero come back from thewar, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door heenters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves abad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; theelements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up,his body was stolen."

"Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world."

"We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I couldn't recognize the world. When I found myself loose the music had ceased the carnival was over and I had been picked clean."

"They never opened the door which leads to the soul."

"Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her - and the me which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of an "end" is intolerable to me."

"To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself."

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

"I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit."

"That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them - that is the tragedy of life."

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

"Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such."

"To paint is to love again, live again, see again. To get up at the crack of dawn in order to take a peek at the water colors one did the day before, or even a few hours before, is like stealing a look at the beloved while she sleeps. The thrill is even greater if one has first to draw back the curtains. How they glow in the cold light of early dawn! Is there any writer who rouses himself at daybreak in order to read the pages of his manuscript? Perish the thought!"

"To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth-I count that something of a miracle."

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

"The continent is full of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom. The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like the rain everything comes in bucketsful - or not at all. The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it's the same story. Nature dominates. Nature wins out. Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people - healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up."

"Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn't matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one."

"For the moment I can think of nothing- except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world."

"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."

"I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company."

"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."

"Every day the choice is presented to us, in a thousand different ways, to live up to the spirit which is in us or to deny it. Whenever we talk about right and wrong we are turning the light of scrutiny upon our neighbors instead of upon ourselves. We judge in order not to be judged. We uphold the law, because it is easier than to defy it. We are all lawbreakers, all criminals, all murderers, at heart. It is not our business to get after the murderers, but to get after the murderer which exists in each and every one of us. And I mean by murder the supreme kind which consists in murdering the spirit."

"Everyman has his own destiny: The only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him."

"I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked."

"And when he got through I felt for the first time that there had really been a war and that the man I was listening had been in it and that despite his bravery the war had made him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be wide-awake and in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the electric chair because he had performed his duty toward his fellow men, which was to deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because one crime washes away the other in the name of God, country and humanity, peace be with you all."

"No stone was laid upon another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy. One thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full. The streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of the belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the empty belly which are null and void."

"If we are always arriving and departing, it is alsotrue that we are eternally anchored. One's destinationis never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."

"Like ships men flounder time and time again."

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

"The word in your mouth is anarchy."

"There is something healthy and invigorating about direct action."

"I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think."

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

"For the man in the paddock, whose duty is is to sweep up manure,the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. Totell him that it is disgusting to spend one's life shoveling up hotturds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if hislivelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved."

"The world is a cancer eating itself away... I am think that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written."

"When a situation gets so bad that no solution seems possible there is left only murder and suicide, or both. These failing, one becomes a buffoon."

"New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless."