America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.
Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.
The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible.
When you stop growing you start dying.
I am getting so far out one day I won’t come back at all.
Open your mind and let the pictures out.
I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.
Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
If after having been exposed to someone’s presence you feel as if you’ve lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.
If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.
Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
A cat’s rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.
My relationships with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance.
Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.
The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change.