The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they’re trying to recapture

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart

I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the...

Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

rip the prisonsopenput theconvictsontelevision

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil...

So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.p.207

Goldstein, you’d be a pretty good boy if you wasn’t so chicken.

At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind.

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. … His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less,...

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

I really am a pessimist. I’ve always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It’s something essentially splendid because it’s not at all routine or automatic. Fascism...

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

I don’t trust compliments. I’ve been getting them for years. Sometimes I deserve them, sometimes I didn’t. But generally when people give you compliments there’s one of two things wrong with them. Either they’re false,...

It is not uncommon for fighters’ camps to be gloomy. In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. Fighters are supposed to. The boredom creates an impatience with...

Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.

I wonder, said the Lord I wonder if I know the answer any more.

Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.

No, but why is Croft that way? Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is...

Let everywritertell hisownliesThat’s freedomof thepress.

Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, sentimental as a lollypop.

I won’t stay inwith married menany moresaid the wise girlthey’re too agreeable,it’s a little too muchlike curlingupwith the good book.You meanagood bookOh, dear,did I saythegood booksighed the witch.

Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome.

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse.

There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found...

I tell you, say the rich,the poor are naughtbut dirty windwelling in air-shaftsover the cindersand droppings ofthe past, theirvoices thickwith greaseand ordure,sewer-greedto corrode the earwith the horrorsof the pastand the voidsof new stupidity.One could drownwaiting...

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York.” (on Tom Wolfe)

One thing I’ve learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don’t feel it; there’s probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.

I’m not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be...