"When I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow."

"Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing."

"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact."

"The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible."

"May 4, 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion. In the front room where the kittens are kept, Calico Jane is nursing one black kitten. I pick up my Tourister. It seems heavy. I look inside and there are her other four kittens."Take care of my babies. Take them with you wherever you go."

"The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it."

"There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks."

"There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose "story "plot "continuity... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer..."

"Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole."

"There is a kidney-shaped fish pool outside the picture window. I cleaned it out and put in some large goldfish I bought in a bait store. The cats are always trying to catch the fish, with no success. One time the white cat leapt for a frog across the pool. The frog dove in and the cat fell in. He is trouble-prone."

"My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people, which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company."

"I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all."

"Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy."

"We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place."

"Americans have a special horror of letting things happen their own way without interference. They would like to jump down their stomachs digest the food and shovel the shit out."

"You know a real friend?Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone."

"Two Lesbian Agents with glazed faces of grafted penis flesh sat sipping spinal fluid through alabaster straws."

"Oh be careful! There they go again!" said the old queen as his string broke spilling his balls over the floor.... "Stop them will you, James, you worthless old shit! Don't just stand there and let the master's balls roll into the coal-bin!"

"The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing."

"Smash the control images. Smash the control machine."

"No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought."

"Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive."

"I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host."

"Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside."

"When you stop growing you start dying."

"There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve."

"Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts."

"A functioning police state needs no police."

"Sodomy is as old as the human species."

"Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life."

"This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games."

"Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has."

"Abandon all nations, the planet drifts to random insect doom."

"After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'"

"I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact."

"Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer."

"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on."

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

"The face of evil is always the face of total need."

"There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?"

"The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet wall closing on the Last Erection."

"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape."

"We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems."

"Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers."

"Language is a virus from outer space."

"Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?"

"As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle."

"The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers."

"Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear."

"Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning."