In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.

Life isn’t stable. Stability is unnatural. The only stable society is the police state. You can have a free society or you can have a stable society. You can’t have both. Take your choice. As...

The ugly may be beautiful, the pretty never.

In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.

If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls...

Evidently, I’d suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else.

There’s no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon.

Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.

When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly...

Beauty! Wasn’t that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers,...

Magic gives him what he wants.

The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam,...

Disorder is inherent in stability. Civilized man doesn’t understand stability. He’s confused it with rigidity. Our political and economic and social leaders drool about stability constantly. It’s their favorite word, next to ‘power.’ ‘Gotta stabilize...

Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we...

The Earth is God’s pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.

Some marriages are made in heaven,Mine was made in Hong Kong, by the same people who make those little rubber pork chops they sell in the pet department at Kmart.

Success can eliminate as many options as failure

Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES.

Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.

Logic only gives man what he needs…Magic gives him what he wants.

In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that’s continually retold in an accent too thick and strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke my friends. The...

Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That’s why, when we ponder–as sooner or later each of us must–exactly what we...

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they’d rather play with yours than theirs. Or...

Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There’s only a difference of degree. We both have the same...

If you want your tree to produce plenty o’ fruit, you’ve got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call...

To be or not to be isn’t the question. The question is how to prolong being.

It is more important to be free than to be happy.

Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to...

Science gives man what he needs.But magic gives him what he wants.

There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky itself is invariably immense. There is a...

But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man.

When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.

When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One...

If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.

…he glanced over his shoulder at her, regarding her, as he often did before they made love, as if she were a lost continent about to be rediscovered.

And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of...

Well, history isn’t ever going to end, happily or unhappily. And history is ending every second – happily for some of us, unhappily for others, happily one second, unhappily the next. History is always ending...

You are a complicated man, but happily complicated. You have found a way to be at home with the world’s confusion, a way to embrace the chaos rather than struggle to reduce it or become...

It is easier to play around with a man’s wife than with his cliches.

Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or...

Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical...

Information about time cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs...

There were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo’s journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears’ basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator,...

If being alive is not a virtue, then there is little virtue in virtue.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it’s the cyanide.

It’s more important to be free than to be happy.

If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the...

If I have been given any gift in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination.