Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.
En route to the final destination, which was always to get trashed, wasted, hammered, crunked up, bombed, wrecked, sloshed, fried, flapjacked, fucked-up, or get plainlong fucked, laid, drained, get so...
It's like a boulder rolling down a hill - you can watch it and talk about it and scream and say Shit! but you can't stop it. It's just a question of where it's going to go.
There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality then it is a quality of the spirit.
American government is like a train on a track. You have the people on the left shouting you have the people on the right. But the train's on track. They just keep ploughing ahead.
It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.
I can remember that on the shelves at home, there were these books by Thomas Wolfe. 'Look Homeward Angel' and 'Of Time and the River.' 'Of Time and the River' had just come out when I was aware of his...
A cult is a religion with no political power.
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitab...
(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.
The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an example of freedom from religion.
Thank God in heaven! What a relief! They could let their breaths out now. Miss Efficiency was a bigot. These days the thing about bigotry was, it was undignified. It was a sign of Low Rent origins, of...
An LSD experience without the LSD -that was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first ti...
You're either on the bus or off the bus.
There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining...
One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
It is either make this thing permanent inside of you or forever just climb draggled up into the conning tower every time for one short glimpse of the horizon.
You don't understand my dis-mounting. It's like climbing a mountain. Would you rather climb the mountain or have a helicopter deposit you on the top? The continual climb, the continual remounting, mak...
Everything in everybody’s life is … significant. And everybody is alert, watching for the meanings. And the vibrations.