To Vik Lovell who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs …

Society is what decides who’s sane and who isn’t, so you got to measure up.

He’s the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.

The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he’s getting it.

I don’t think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.

You’re making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You’re not crazy the way they think. Yes…I see…

But I remember one thing: it wasn’t me that started acting deaf, it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

Good writing ain’t necessarily good reading.

. . .sometimes reading the same page over and over, until one sleepy afternoon something clicked, like a lock unlocking, and she saw those printed doors swing open on a vast house of words.

He’s like an old clock the won’t tell time but won’t stop neither with the hands bend out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm rusted silent, an old worthless clock...

I don’t seem able to get it straight in my mind….

turns me on so loud it’s like no sound, everybody yelling at me hands over their ears from behind a glass wall, faces working around in talk circles but no sound from the mouths. my...

While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top,spreading his laugh across the water. Laughing at the girl,at the guys, at George,at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at...

But if the strength ain’t real, I recall thinking the very last thing that day, before I finally passed out, then the weakness sure enough is. Weakness is true and real. I used to accuse...

You can’t really be strong until you can see a funny side to things.

But he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.

Which is just another way of blaming, and perhaps the best way, because there is solace and a certain stoical peace in blaming everything on the rain, and then blaming something as uncontrollable as the...

I’m accustomed to being top man. I been a bull goose catskinner for every gyppo logging operation in the Northwest and bull goose gambler all the way from Korea, was even bull goose pea weeder...

You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself

I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have...

I can’t do nothing for you either, Billy. You know that. None of us can. You got to understand that as soon as a man goes to help somebody, he leaves himself wide open. He...

I discovered at an early age that I was – shall we be kina and say different? It’s a better, more general word than the other one… I got sick… It was the feeling that...

…I think apparatus burned out all over the ward trying to adjust to her come busting in like she did-took electronic readings on her and calculated they weren’t built to handle something like this on...

They can’t tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.

It’s fall coming, I thought, I can smell that sour-molasses smell of silage, clanging the air like a bell – smell like somebody’s been burning oak leaves, left them to smolder overnight because they’re too...

When a man showed up you didn’t want to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at yours, because it’s painful to see...

It’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen……if they don’t exist, how can a man see them?

Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever- the blasphemer, the dissenter- will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies.

I don’t think I can give you an answer. Oh, I could give you Freudian reasons with fancy talk, and that would be right as far as it went. But what you want are the...

That ain’t me, that ain’t my face. It wasn’t even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn’t even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way...

We’d just shared the last beer and slung the empty can out the window at a stop sign and were just waiting back to get the feel of the day, swimming in that kind of...

I’d think, maybe he truly is something extraordinary. He’s what he is, that’s it. Maybe that makes him strong enough, being what he is.

The way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount.””That’s what they said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay...

It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed...

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years...

In any given situation there will always be more dumb people than smart people. We ain’t many!

I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked...

The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon

The most work he did on [the urinals] was to run a brush once or twice apiece, singing some song as loud as he could in time to the swishing brush; then he’d splash in...

All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.

He knew you can’t really be strong until you can see a funny side of things.

Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

To hell with facts! We need stories!