“Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.”
“A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.”
“Actors die so loud.”
“Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?”
“The world is the mirror of myself dying.”
“Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”
“The American ideal is youth --handsome, empty youth.”
“Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.”
“Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.”
“Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.”
“In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.”
“What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.”
“Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything -- except his own nature.”
“Sin, guilt, neurosis --they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”
“An artist is always alone -- if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.”
“You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.”
“Remorse is impotence, it will sin again. Only repentance is strong, it can end everything.”
“What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.”
“All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.”
“It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world -- it's the American way of looking at things.”
“I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.”
“Nine-tenths of our sickness can be prevented by right thinking plus right hygiene -- nine-tenths of it!”
“What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs.”
“And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?”
“The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.”
“Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.”
“Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.”
“The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure.”
“We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets -- we remember only.”
“Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.”