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...

Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.

I don’t know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don’t even have a word for love—that is, a word for...

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.