Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.
Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.
Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.
They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale.
I take this continent with me into the grave.
Why then you’re as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust ‘reality’ and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings.
How many times can a man go down and still be alive?
His flesh took paleness from his bones.
I don’t believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.
The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.
The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we’ve done fine tonight. Even Death can’t spoil it.
Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt.
And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a women half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between.
Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there was it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away.
Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds.
Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay.
I don’t have a computer. A computer’s a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.
Write 1000 words a day. That’s only about four pages, but force yourself to do it. Put your finger down your throat and throw up. That’s what writing’s all about.
Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do.
Ideas result from the collision of metaphors inside the head.