A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.
Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.
The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.
Too weird to live, too rare to die!
When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.
It never got weird enough for me.
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.
We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.
Good people drink good beer.
We can't stop here, this is bat country!
Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.
All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name. Remembered line from a long- forgotten poem
Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.
It was obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear.
America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable
Weird behavior is natural in smart children, like curiosity is to a kitten.
You better take care of me Lord, if you don't you're gonna have me on your hands.
Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.
The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.
For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.
It was one of those fine little love stories that can make you smile in your sleep at night.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.
With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree.
It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.
I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.
A word to the wise is infuriating.
I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.
On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.
It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.
Sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whiskey and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind but falling in love and not getting arrested.
In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.
There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.
Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.
You can't miss what you never had.
Faster, Faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.
No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.
Pray to God, but row away from the rocks.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.
If you can't make yourself understood by your friends, you'll be in trouble when your enemies come for you.
To make a point of declaring friendship is to cheapen it. For men's emotions are very rarely put into words successfully.
Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.
Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.
I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time.
I'm a relatively respectable citizen. Multiple felon perhaps, but certainly not dangerous.
Poor bastard. Wait 'till he sees the bats.
On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.
Turn the goddam music up! My heart feels like an alligator!
I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.
I miss Nixon. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal.
This is the fast lane, folks...and some of us like it here.
Take it from me, there's nothing like a job well done. Except the quiet enveloping darkness at the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam after a job done any way at all.
And the sad notes floated out to the patio and hung in the trees like birds too tired to fly
One of them is knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is permanent… Ho ho. Take that one to bed with you tonight.
I will fight for your right to be weird- just as I know you will fight for mine.
Sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks...
You took too much man, too much, too much.
I’m a word freak. I like words. I’ve always compared writing to music. That’s the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it’s like music.
He had come so far from himself that I don't think he knew who he was anymore.
Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.
He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.
At the top of the mountain we are all snow leopards.
She was wearing the same clothes, but now she looked haggard and dirty. The delicate illusions that get us through life can only stand so much strain.
And he would probably not agree with my conviction that a sense of humor is the main measure of sanity. But who can say for sure? Humor is a very private thing.
I never knew where I was going, but I ripped the tits off of everything that got in my way. By the time they figured me out, it was too late.
You won't find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains.
Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo.
Ah, that we lack the courage of our romantic convictions; and thereby miss the wine of life, forgoing the very thing that makes living worthwhile.
Jesus Creeping God! Is there a priest in this tavern? I want to confess! I'm a fucking sinner! Venal, mortal, carnal, major, minor - however you want to call it, Lord... I'm guilty.
The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride.
What kind of rat bastard psychotic would play that song- right now, at this moment?
My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.
An outlaw can be defined as somebody who lives outside the law, beyond the law and not necessarily against it.
There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.
Jesus! Did I SAY that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me? I glanced over at my attorney, but he seemed oblivious...
Who said anything about slicing you up? ... I just wanted to carve a little Z on your forehead-- nothing serious.
Still humping the American Dream
It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.
A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.
I knew a Buddhist once, and I've hated myself ever since.
You can't hoard fun. It has no shelf life.
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.
All energy flows according to the whims of the great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him.
The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.
There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.
I am a road man for the lords of karma.
Whatever he might have denied me was unimportant; it was the fact that he could deny me anything at all, even what I didn't want
A cap of good acid costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and Holy Ghost on drums.
Right' i said. 'but first, we need the car. and after that, the cocaine. and then the tape recorder, for special music, and some acapulco shirts.
