I began to get a feeling (…) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn’t make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.

home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else’s ass.

When you stop growing you start dying.

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence – their speech centres are destroyed – except for...

May 4, 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion. In the front room where the kittens are kept, Calico Jane is nursing one black...

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.

Language is a virus from outer space

You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.

I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn’t make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is...

All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else’s nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will...

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity,...

The white cat symbolizes the silvery moon prying into corners and cleansing the sky for the day to follow. The white cat is “the cleaner” or “the animal that cleans itself,” described by the Sanskrit...

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself...

We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems.

As I was walking past Tony Pastor’s I saw Pat, the lesbian bouncer, throw a drunken young sailor out into the street. The sailor said, “That place is full of fucking queers.” He swung at...

Nobody’s busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don’t worry about what they’re doing in South Korea and places like that. It’s like the standard of living. Are you...

I had the feeling that all over America such stupid arguments were taking place on street corners and in bars and restaurants. All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking...

As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers.” Both favor alcohol and are against pot.

The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time… and you can’t see it if you refuse to face the possibility.

I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren’t cute,& if they are cute they rapidly outgrow it

To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant...

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.

Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.

My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I’m not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.

Did I ever tell you about the manwho taught his asshole to talk?His whole abdomen would move up and down,you dig, farting out the words.It was unlike anything I ever heard. Bubbly, thick, stagnant sound....

We’re very near a certain point where money doesn’t mean anything… They say: How much money is this going to cost? This is really a totally meaningless concept. Money determines less and less our reality....

As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary

Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

The face of “evil” is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the...

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone,...

Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with...

A cat’s rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.

The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be...

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I’d have to say he can’t do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the...

when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

Abandon all nations, the planet drifts to random insect doom.

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I...

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don’t know we know.

Cuando empezaron a decir que la literatura norteamericana no existía y que la inglesa era mala, perdí la compostura y les dije que la literatura española merecía estar en el retrete, colgada de un clavo...

I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The...

Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.

Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.

What’s with the serum?”I don’t know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man’s not to be trusted. Might do almost anything…Turn a massacre into a sex orgy…”Or...

Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a number of wild cats...