"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."
"Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire.... Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help."
"We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."
"Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them."
"You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics."
"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."
"If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose."
"Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone."
"Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink."
"Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing."