We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. There are many 'bads' - bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even 'bad' white males. Only, when you write about 'bad' white males, they don't complain about it. And need I say that there are 'good' blacks, 'good' homosexuals and 'good' women?

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity.

When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.

We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.