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...

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face.

There are no innocent bystanders … what are they doing there in the first place?

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would...

As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair...

A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling...

But you’re an artist. You don’t believe in decency and honesty and gratitude.

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.

We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis … [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother’s Day card. There was a horrible,...

Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

Paranoia is just having the right information.

Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.

The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers

There is a kidney-shaped fish pool outside the picture window. I cleaned it out and put in some large goldfish I bought in a bait store. The cats are always trying to catch the fish,...

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the...

The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it.

…Communism, it’s a reactive formation derived from capitalism. For this reason it’s less flexible and has a lower survival potential. The days of laissez-faire capitalism are completely dead, and the assumptions of nineteenth-century Communism are...

continuity”… Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function… I am not an entertainer…

Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience–any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict.

It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct jail. It was a clear bright day, but there was warmth in the sun....

Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.

And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking themselves after the meal. Practical animals, they prefer to have others provide the food … some of them...

Cheat your landlord if you can — and must — but do not try to shortchange the Muse.

Jesus Christ said ‘by their fruits ye shall know them,’ not by their disclaimers.

Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and transluscent. I don’t know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another...

You know a real friend?Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or...