A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.

Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

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.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.

You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative

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

Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.

When you stop growing you start dying.

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

You know a real friend? Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.

There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.

Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit -- not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.

Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.

Language is a virus from outer space

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.

There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.

The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

The face of 'evil' is always the face of total need.

Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born.

The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

Thou shalt not be such a shit, you don't know you are one.

I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers

Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

Open your mind and let the pictures out

As soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.

In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.

It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.

Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.