All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet – if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.
If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, you’ve got it half licked.
It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say ‘amen.’
Remorse is impotence; it will sin again. Only repentance is strong – it can end everything.
France may one day exist no more, but the Dordogne will live on just as dreams live on and nourish the souls of men.
Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must writer and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you.
We don’t trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation.
The moment one is on the side of life; peace and security drop out of consciousness. The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.
How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician.
I wanted to die; I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for.
Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it.
Every day that we fail to live out the maximum of our potentialities we kill the Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Christ which is in us.
It was only in my forties that I started feeling young.
To know Paris is to know a great deal.
Of course you don’t die. Nobody dies. Death doesn’t exist. You only reach a new level of vision, a new realm of consciousness, a new unknown world.
When you can’t create you can work.
You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.
You have to write a million words before you find your voice as a writer.
After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I’d say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you’re walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you’re not vitally interested in.