Great Throughts Treasury

"Hemingway said: 'It don't come anymore.' So where did it go??"

"Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him."

"Here lies a stupid son of a bitch who tried to make Death a company cop."

"Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass."

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

"Hip - Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands jive talk. Someone who is with it. The expression is not subject to definition because, if you don't dig what it means, no one can ever tell you."

"How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity."

"How many years threaded on a needle of blood? Hands slack on lap he sits looking out at the winter dawn with the cancelled eyes of junk."

"Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable."

"Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to."

"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."

"I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all."

"Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside."

"I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself."

"I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don?t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits."

"I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence."

"I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact."

"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."

"I can say definitely that weed is an aphrodisiac and that sex is more enjoyable under the influence of weed than without it. Anyone who has used good weed will verify this statement."

"I bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink..."

"I do spend a great deal of time alone. I'm not very gregarious. I don't like parties and miscellaneous gatherings with no particular purpose. I think parties are largely a mistake. The bigger they are the more mistaken they are."

"I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love?that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I'm uncertain. Love, well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time."

"I don?t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it."

"I don't make myself work. It's just the thing I want to do. To be completely alone in a room, to know that there'll be no interruptions and I've got eight hours is exactly what I want -- yeah, just paradise."

"I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question Why did you start using narcotics in the first place? should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area."

"I feel that this life is sort of a penal colony. People have goofed or we wouldn't be here."

"I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it."

"I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life."

"I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. . . . I did absolutely nothing."

"I had the feeling that all over America such stupid arguments were taking place on street corners and in bars and restaurants. All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say I don't take any shit! and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him."

"I lay down and tried to sleep. When I closed my eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and nose eaten by disease. The disease spread, melting the face into an amoeboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it."

"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."

"I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union."

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

"I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, acute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing."

"I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?"

"I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts."

"I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people."

"I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events."

"I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy."

"I was lying there trying to control the fear. I did not know much about this uremic poisoning. A woman I'd known slightly in Texas had died of it after drinking a bottle of beer ever hour, night and day, for two weeks."

"I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous."

"I was new in the game and like all young thieves thought I had a license to steal. It didn't last."

"I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers... I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants-a body-after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is, only the colorless no smell of death...Nobody can breath and smell it through pink convolutions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh."

"I would say for a great percentage of people, all they do is repeat their past. They really don't have a future at all."

"If a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his rump, fanny I believe is the word, gentlemen, heh heh for passive intercourse or (b) if he is a different type baboon more extrovert and well-adjusted, lead an attack on an even weaker baboon if he can find one."

"I wasn't exposed to art as I was growing up, and can't recall the first time I saw a work of art. However, I remember very clearly a vision I had of a little green reindeer when I was a child, and visions emanate from the same mythical area where painting resides. Whatever the reason, I immediately felt comfortable working with visual materials."

"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."

"If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes."

"If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention."