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.

Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece.

In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen

Paranoia is just having the right information.

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.

How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.

Danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal.

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary

When I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.

I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.

The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not. - pg. 41

Too perfect to be sexually attractive.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.

What a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.

Dream long enough and dream hard enough you will come to know dreaming can make it so...

I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.

If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.

And if you're doing a deal with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing.

I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.

If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

When he smiled the fear flew away in little pieces of light...

Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.

Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.

People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.

Like Spain, I am bound to the past.

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.

Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.

Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.

I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute, & if they are cute they rapidly outgrow it

A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.

Cowboy: New York hood talk means kill the mother fucker wherever you find him. A rat is a rat is a rat is a rat. Is an informer.

If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner.