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.

The word in your mouth is anarchy.

I saw the errors I had made and assumed full responsibility for everything.

Things happen or they don’t happen, that’s all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we’ve lost the habit of falling asleep. We...

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...

I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable

Life’s wildest moment—she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies.

The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.

A beautiful nap this afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae.

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

Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown…

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest...

When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes.

I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit.

He asked me innocently, what then had brought me to his home, and without a minutes hesitation I told him an astounding lie. A lie which was later to prove a great truth. I told...

But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if hehasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that youcan’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us...

I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.

Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there...

If we are always arriving and departing, it is alsotrue that we are eternally anchored. One’s destinationis never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals

Eens heb ik gemeend dat menselijk zijn het hoogste doel was dat een mens kon nastreven, maar nu zie ik in dat dit bedoeld was om me vernietigen. Nu ga ik er trots op te...

I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep...

To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I count that something of a miracle.

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.

That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.

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...

I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of...

It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for...

Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn’t matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one.

De wiegen der beschaving zijn de verpestende riolen van de wereld, het knekelhuis waarin de stinkende baarmoeders hun bloederige pakjes vlees en been toevertrouwen.

Over and over again I have said that there is no way out of the present impasse. If we were wide awake we would be instantly struck by the horrors which surround us … We...

Anaïs, I don’t know how to tell you what I feel. I live in perpetual expectancy. You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize...

What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.

There is one thing I like about the Poles—their language. Polish, when it is spoken by intelligent people, puts me in ecstasy. The sound of the language evokes strange images in which there is always...

We have no need for genius – genius is dead. We have need for strong hands, for spirits who are willing to give up the ghost and put on flesh…

Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen.

What I secretly longed for was to disentangle myself of all those lives which had woven themselves into the pattern of my own life and were making my destiny a part of theirs. To shake...

We defend with our lives the petty principles which divide us. The common principle, which is the establishment of the empire of man on earth, we never lift a finger to defend. We are frightened...

And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap… it drive me nuts sometimes… I want to kick them out immediately… I do now and then. But that...

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,...

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)...

What’s a fuck when what I want is love?

Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant

Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem-to be yourself!

For the moment I can think of nothing— except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world.

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything

The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment.

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...

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

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...