Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.
I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because Im not so censored when I use dream material.
Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.
Writing must be a machine for breaking down, that is, allowing the now uncontrolled and uncontrollable reconstitutions of thoughts and expressions. All other kinds of writing simply express.
Those who are driven by poverty, those who’re free from material worries hunger exhausting labor a joyless existence ask the same question, the question of meaning.
You can’t change old people. Unlike middle-aged people, they do what they want.
The more rapidly the water moves, the lighter it seems.
A language is the appearances of connections therefore language as in writing doesn’t express anything: it creates.
It’s possible to name everything and to destroy the world.
Writing is one method of dealing with being human or wanting to suicide cause in order to write you kill yourself at the same time while remaining alive.
Come alive, dead heart, and sing.
The two main girlfriends he has had wanted him to support them in the manner to which they certainly weren’t accustomed even though he couldn’t put his flabby hands on a penny.
I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.
I have about a hundred cats living in me and all of them are curious.
She wore red lipstick the next time that I saw her, though her hair was more voluminous with dirt than before. Owing, like everything else about these girls, to the fertility of rats.
All the people around Hester hate her and despise her and think she’s a total freak. The kid’s beyond human law and human consideration. How do you feel about yourself when every human being you hear and see and smell every day of your being thinks you’re worse than garbage? Your conception of who you are has always, at least partially, depended on how the people around you behaved towards you... You don’t know. How can you know anything? How can you know anything? You begin to go crazy.
I walked along a highway. I was looking for a place to sit down, for some grass I could walk in, for a wood I could explore. I walked for hours. All land on both sides of the highway, cultivated and wild, was private. I had to keep walking on the highway. I thought that people today when they move move only by car, train, boat, or plane and so move only on roads. They perceive only the roads, the map, the prison. I think it’s becoming harder to get off the roads.
Dear David, Are you a Tibetan monk yet? I used to hate you because you didn’t love me so much you would give up your whole life for me. I expect this of every man. In retrospect, I realize that I was also selfish: I should have stopped making demands that you not be the closet female-hating sadist you are.
Without language the only people the rebels can kill are themselves.
When the word ends, there’ll be no more air. That’s why it’s important to pollute the air now.
I’m sick of this society. “Earn a living” as if I’m not yet living; lobotomized and robotized from birth, they tell me I can’t do anything I want to do in the subtlest and sneakiest ways possible. They want to erase all possible hints that I’ve been born. I have two centers: love and my desire to sleep.