For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.

Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.

I like to see life with its teeth out.

If our hearts are at war, we would not be able to experience Heaven in our hearts

You will be a failure, until you impress the subconscious with the conviction you are a success. This is done by making an affirmation which 'clicks.'

I've got to do something to make up for all those self-absorbed and selfish years when I just, you know, was taking drugs, sitting in my room, doing bad things, whatever.

Poverty makes people do reckless things, but [the rich] do worse to protect their [interests]

As a boy, when I was bad, my mother would chew me out in Spanish. And since I was bad a lot, I learned a lot of Spanish!

I've always wanted male friends that I could be real intimate with and talk about important things with and be as affectionate with that person as I would be with a girl.

When I was growing up, my parents took in foster children. From a young age, I learned that there are a lot of children in need.

Will is to grace as the horse is to the rider.

One day the "Don't Knows" will get in and then where will we be?

I just don't like the word 'fun'--it's like Volkswagen, or bell-bottoms, or patchouli-oil or bean-sprouts...it rubs me up the wrong way.