I will never again go to people under false pretenses even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people.
We kill because we are afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we’d have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong.
The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.
Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul’s death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.
Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself.
What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient.
The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you.
When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
The man who is intoxicated with life does not pass judgment, does not seek to come to a conclusion, does not impose his message on the world.
To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
My world of human beings had perished. I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort.
Even if it doesn’t work, there is something healthy and invigorating about direct action.
I read to be taken out of myself, to become ecstatic.
I’d rather sit down and write a letter than call someone up. I hate the telephone.
Keep your exclamation points under control!
There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books.