You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways–but it doesn’t hurt as much when you’re right.

A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.

I am a child of the American Century, and I feel a genetic commitment to understanding why it happened, and why I take it so personally.

From the very beginning Ihad felt a definite contact with Yeamon, a kind of tenuous understanding that talk is cheap in this league and that a man who knew what he was after had damn...

Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious...

It was almost May. I knew that New York was getting warm now, that London was wet, that Rome was hot — and I was on Vieques, where it was always hot and where New...

Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I’d probably miss if I stayed straight. But I’m neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill...

Hallucinations are bad enough. But after awhile you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort...

Politics is the Art of Controlling Your Enviroment.

Months later, when I rarely saw the Angels, I still had the legacy of the big machine — four hundred pounds of chrome and deep red noise to take out on the Coast Highway and...

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.

Across the board… Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze, or coke as we are – and we’re not weird, are we? Hell no, we’re just...

Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.

On the way down the hill we walked three abreast in the cobblestone street, drunk and laughing and talking like men who knew they would separate at dawn and travel to the far corners of...

Too weird to live, too rare to die!

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

Well,” he said. “I hope to God I never make forty — I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.

Watching TV becomes a full-time job when you can scan 200 channels all day and all night and still have the option of punching Night Dreams into the video machine, if the rest of the...

KNOW YOUR DOPE FIEND. YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT! You will not be able to see his eyes because of the Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants...

The brutal reality of politics would be probably intolerable without drugs.

I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people would believe.

Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure. My attorney has never been able to accept the notion—often espoused by reformed...

Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding–shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at...

The person who doesn’t scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs

I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague that there was no sense talking about it.

In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

God.

Security … what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that...

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used...

Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.

To give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal — to point...

How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of...

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and...

Finally we came over a rise and I saw the Caribbean…My first feeling was a wild desire to drive a stake in the sand and claim the place for myself. The beach was white as...

The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes.

There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.

America…just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable

Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something,...

Kill the body and the head will die.

Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.

How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the...

Justice is not cheap in this country, and people who insist on it are usually either desperate or possessed by some private determination bordering on monomania.

The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine,...

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole...

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60’s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without...

Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contest and won a two-week vacation–all expenses paid–wherever he wanted to go. Any place in...

Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

The reefer butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach… cockroach… cockroach…