"Perhaps all pleasure is only relief."

"Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time."

"Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing."

"That old feeling is still in my leaking heart."

"Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit."

"Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction."

"It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct jail. It was a clear bright day, but there was warmth in the sun. Danny shivered with an inner cold. He turned up the collar of his worn, greasy black overcoat. This beat benny wouldn't pawn for a deuce, he thought."

"What's with the serum?"I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything...Turn a massacre into a sex orgy..."Or a joke."Precisely. Arty type...No principles..."

"As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can't be just, be arbitrary."

"Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face."

"The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets."

"The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host."

"A junkie spends half his life waiting."

"And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking themselves after the meal. Practical animals, they prefer to have others provide the food ... some of them do. There must have been a split between the cats who accepted domestication and those who did not."

"Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective."

"You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live."

"For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling "vaguely guilty."

"You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere."

"I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute,& if they are cute they rapidly outgrow it."

"I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact."

"How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven."

"The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility."

"Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus."

"All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war. "There's no place for impractical dreamers around here, that's what they always say. "Your writing activities will be directed, kindly stop horsing around. "As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers. Both favor alcohol and are against pot."

"Why are we here? We're here to go!"

"There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit."

"Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination."

"In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed."

"Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

"Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative."

"Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden."

"Junk sickness is the reverse side of junk kick. The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkies run on junktime and junkmetabolism. They are subject to junk climate. They are warmed and chilled by junk. The kick of junk is living under junk conditions. You cannot escape from junk sickness anymore than you can escape from junk kick after a shot."

"Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony."

"The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body."

"Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo - and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way."

"I knew that I no longer wanted to take junk. If I could have made one decision, it would have been no more junk, ever, but when it came to the process of quitting I did not have the drive. It gave me a terrible feeling of helplessness to watch myself break every schedule I set up, as though I did not have control over my actions."

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."

"Thinking is not enough. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any... thing."

"You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence."

"If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution."

"I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits."

"Paranoia is just having the right information."

"Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass."

"Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience--any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict."

"But you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude."

"I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means of increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life."

"Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death."

"The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits."

"I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself."

"Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage."