The use of machines is, in its essence, the same as that of mathematics: to simplify the process of problem-solving.

You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!

It was a joy! Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.

The best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them

The more crap you believe, the better off you are.

It’s better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.

It was better for me when I could imagine greatness in others, even if it wasn’t always there.

In my next life I want to be a cat. To sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. To sit around licking my ass.

Nothing is worse than to finish a good shit, then reach over and find the toilet paper container empty. Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass.

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.

And then there are some who believe that old relationships can be revived and made new again. but please if you feel that way don’t phone don’t write don’t arrive

People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.

To fight for each minute is to fight for what is possible within yourself, so that your life and your death will not be like theirs.

One can never be sure whether it’s good poetry or bad acid

Whiskey makes the heart beat faster but it sure doesn’t help the mind and isn’t it funny how you can ache just from the deadly drone of existence?

Nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.

He asked, “What makes a man a writer?” “Well,” I said, “it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.

Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.

Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

In this land some of us fuck more than we die but most of us die better than we fuck

Nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing.

People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.

So it’s always a process of letting go, one way or another

I said goodbye again sucking up all that was left of her into the little that was left of me. I said, ‘don’t look for me again. fuck it. we are all lost. goodbye, goodbye.

The tigers have found me and I do not care.

I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.

The fuckers. There, I feel better. God-damned human race. There, I feel better.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

If you get married they think you’re finished and if you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete.

In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.

The trouble with a mask is it never changes

She is no longer the beautiful woman she was. she sends photos of herself sitting upon a rock by the ocean alone and damned. I could have had her once. I wonder if she thinks I could have saved her?

Each man’s hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face.

It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun

Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness.

Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn’t so.

You son of a bitch, she said, I am trying to build a meaningful relationship. you can’t build it with a hammer, he said.

Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It’s like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.

I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.

I’m going, she said. I love you but you’re crazy, you’re doomed.

I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: “Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I’ll be ready.

And yet women-good women–frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.

Some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.

I drive around the streets an inch away from weeping, ashamed of my sentimentality and possible love.

I never met another man I’d rather be. And even if that’s a delusion, it’s a lucky one.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting

It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.

There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.

She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn’t have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.

Dogs and angels are not very far apart

Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.

We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

Lighting new cigarettes, pouring more drinks. It has been a beautiful fight. Still is.

Without literature, life is hell.

Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.

I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.

She was consumed by 3 simple things: drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more: youth and beauty

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.

What a weary time those years were — to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting

Life’s as kind as you let it be.

The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.

There is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy

You boys can keep your virgins give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old.

Baby,” I said, “I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.

There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock

I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn’t a nightmare.

Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.

People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.

Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.

I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.

Of course it’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you.

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

Those who escape hell however never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.

Being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.

I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.

Some lose all mind and become soul,insane. some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual. some lose both and become accepted

Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.

Find what you love and let it kill you.

If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose

There are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it’s too late and there’s nothing worse than too late

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

I wanted the whole world or nothing.

You have to die a few times before you can really live.

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

What matters most is how well you walk through the fire

Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.