"It is with the soul that we grasp the essence of another human being, not with the mind, nor even with the heart."

"And her delicacy offended. Who wants a delicate whore! Claude would even ask you to turn your face away when she squatted over the bidet. All wrong! A man, when he's burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants to see everything, even how they make water."

"1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."3) Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.4) Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!5) When you can't create you can work.6) Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.7) Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.8) Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure."

"The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way."

"And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?"

"Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood."

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

"Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it."

"Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil."

"This was the sort of ebullience and élan I prayed for when I felt the desire to write. I used to sit down and wait for this to happen. But it never did happen — not this way. It happened afterwards, sometimes when I had left the machine and gone for a walk. Yes, suddenly it would come on, like an attack, pell-mell, from every direction, a veritable inundation, an avalanche — and there I was, helpless, miles away from the typewriter, not a piece of paper in my pocket."

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

"We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy."

"When a desperate, hungry spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs squeal it is because he knows where to put the live wire of sex, because he knows that beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound that never heals."

"He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment."

"Chaos is the score upon which reality is written."

"I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen."

"It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things."

"My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American."

"A valise without straps. A hole without a key. She had a German mouth, French ears, Russian ass. Cunt international. When the flag waved it was red all the way back to the throat. You entered on the Boulevard Jules-Ferry and came out at the Porte de la Villette. You droppedyour sweetbreads into the tumbrils " red tumbrils with two wheels, naturally. At the confluence of the Ourcq and Marne, where the water sluices through the dikes and lies like glass under thebridges."

"Every day that we fail to live out the maximum of our potentialities we kill the Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Christ which is in us."

"Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm."

"What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?"

"How speak about an art which no one recognizes as an art? I know that a great deal has already been written about the "art of the cinema". One can read about it most every day in the newspapers & the magazines. But it is not the art of the cinema which you will find discussed therein--it is rather dire, botched embryo as it now stands revealed before our eyes, the still-birth which was mangled in the womb by the obstetricians of art."

"Build your cities proud and high. Lay your sewers. Span your rivers. Work feverishly. Sleep dreamlessly. Sing madly, like the bulbul. Underneath, below the deepest foundations, there lives another race of men. They are dark, sombre, passionate. They muscle into the bowels of the earth. They wait with a patience which is terrifying. They are the scavengers. They emerge when everything topples into dust."

"Whoever uses the spirit that isin him creatively is an artist. Tomake living itself an art, that isthe goal."

"There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy."

"We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate."

"The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary."

"I think if Jeremy Corbyn got a cloak, he'd make a very good Gandalf."

"Even if it doesn't work, there is something healthy and invigorating about direct action."

"Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing."

"If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms."

"Either you take in believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird."

"The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself."

"The only peace the only security is in fulfillment."

"Literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed."

"There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry."

"Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him."

"One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard."

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

"The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love."

"In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest."

"To move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain. The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the great crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking of what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What these powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything God-like about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything."

"Ik kwam er achter dat ik er mijn hele leven heus niet naar had verlang om te leven - als wat anderen doen tenminste leven genoemd kan worden - maar wel om mezelf te kunnen uitdrukken."

"Life's wildest moment---she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies."

"Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves."

"Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery."