I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.
Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.
There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.
Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture
We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.
Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart
There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.
Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
I guess all that's left is to love the fire.
Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon
The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.
Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.
Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.
The more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable.
I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind
When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.
Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away
The jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused groping and unimportant dissatisfactions.
That was how the tears went down Cherry's face...a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.
Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found more gold.
Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take chances with his readers’ lives.
I wonder, said the Lord I wonder if I know the answer any more.
...and dread came back like a hoot from a bully on the street outside.
Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver's nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss.
The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful.
Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome.
There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York." (on Tom Wolfe)
It is easy to comprehend people who are weaker than ourselves, but it is not as simple to be ready for the true feelings of those more powerful.
So long as you use a knife, there's some love left.
Men who work at Time have a life expectancy which is not long said the young man from Newsweek
In the South of Spain, one could look to vice as quickly as to virtue for a sense of tradition.
So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, sentimental as a lollypop.
A fire had begun to spread in me. It was burning now in my stomach and my lungs were dry as old leaves, my heart had a herded pressure which gave promise to explode.
At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind.
How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse.
The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.
His decision had been made in the valley, and it lay as an iron warp in his mind. He could have turned back no more easily than he could have killed himself.
It takes all kinds to make a world.
The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own.
Rip the prisons open put the convicts on television
Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.
I could not begin to mourn Deborah or my mind would ride off with me. There was nothing so delicate in all the world as one's last touch of control.
...the Waldorf looked like one of the dead and empty spaces which collect about the exit of a man who has lost a million in an hour.
Certain kinds of honor could not be lost without demanding that one consecrate oneself thereafter—no matter how unsuited and unprepared—to a life of revenge. I
Perhaps the measure of the best art is that it does not excite envy.
Then comes the left jab again. A converted southpaw? It has something of the shift of locus which comes from making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blond wig.
If men could move out of infancy at half a mile an hour and get up to eighteen thousand miles an hour in one lifetime, well, who was to assume that the walls of the universe were safe from future men?
American’s capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die.
I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF
The Anti-Semiten. Why don’t they ever learn? Why does God permit it?” Roth sneered. “God is a luxury I don’t give myself.
Listen my love the hour is late my side has an ache If you don't get a taxi my heart will break
You know,” he laughed easily, “with all the goddam drinkin’ Ah’ve done, Ah still can’t remember the taste of it unless Ah got the bottle right with me.
