There is a wine called Easy Days and Mellow Nights, well-known on the outskirts of the Navajo reservation. It is an economical wine, fortified with the best of intentions, and I recommend it to every serious wino.
In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.
Mental degeneracy may be caused by lead poisoning. Or by a poor dip in the gene pool.
We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races – by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.
I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life – if I live that long.
I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.
My cousin Elroy spent seven years as an IBM taper staring at THINK signs on the walls before he finally got a good idea: He quit.
I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth.
By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.
Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.
My Aunt Ida at age eighty-three: ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I’ll be dead pretty soon. And frankly, I don’t give a damn.’
Every moment is precious. And precarious.
We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foresight of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement.
How can I be so evil? It ain’t easy.
Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one.
No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February.
The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.
Art, science, philosophy, religion – each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.
All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.
You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.