Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink (…) That was a very different thing from wanting to die.

Lately, Mami’s eyes have been so dark, I don’t like looking into them because I’m afraid I’ll fall in.

The revolution of consciousness is connected to the food revolution

Too much is how I love you, but too well is how I know you.

Promising is the eve of giving.

I'm a maniac, and everyone on this stage is stupid, fat and ugly. And Ben [Carson] you're a terrible surgeon.

When it's over, we may feel wooed, adored, appreciated, or abused, but it will have been an affair to remember.

Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.