Great Throughts Treasury

"Like many people who have nothing to do, he was very resentful of any claims on his time."

"Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't."

"Look at the immigrants coming to America looking for a better life. What they got now? If they had the misfortune to be successful one of the most gruesome cultural straightjackets in history."

"Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey."

"Lola?s was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer-and-soda joint. There was a Coca-Cola box full of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube-metal stools covered in yellow glazed leather ran down one side of the room as far as the jukebox. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs and made horrible screeching noises when the maid pushed them around to sweep. There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither past nor future in Lola?s. The place was a waiting room, where certain people checked in at certain times."

"Like Spain, I am bound to the past."

"Look at these poisonous color maps where flesh trees grow from human sacrifices; listen to these sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay"

"Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE. [last words]"

"Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will."

"Man is a political animal' said Aristotle telling one of the greatest lies in human history. For every man has more in common with the hills and with the stars than with other men."

"Man has sold his soul for time, language, tools, weapons, and dominance."

"Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels."

"Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole."

"Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data."

"Moor did not have tuberculosis or kidney trouble or undulant fever. He was sick with the sickness of death. Death was in every cell of his body."

"Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'"

"Mohammed? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce."

"Most people don't notice what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: for God's sake, keep your eyes open."

"Most of the trouble in the 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. Now your virus is an obligate cellular parasite and my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right. And right here we must make a distinction between the hard-core virus-occupied shit and a plain, ordinary, mean no-good son of a bitch. Some of these sons of bitches don't cause any trouble at all, just want to be left alone and are only dangerous when molested, like the Brown Recluse."

"My ass is worth more than the Louvre! My farts are ambrosia and shit pure gold turds. My dick soft diamond casts morning sun."

"Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear."

"My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company."

"My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually."

"My experience as an addict was very useful to me as writer: the whole syndrome of addiction and withdrawal and the extensions of that and other forms of addiction. It gave me a great deal of material. A writer can profit by something that someone else may not be able to profit from at all. Yet they were very disagreeable experiences. Very boring experiences."

"My purpose in writing has always been to express human potentials and purposes relevant to the Space Age."

"My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute."

"NAKED Lunch -- a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."

"My relationships with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance."

"Naked Mr. America, burning frantic with self bone love, screams out: My asshole confounds the Louvre! I fart ambrosia and shit pure gold turds! My cock spurts soft diamonds in the morning sunlight!"

"Never give succor to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit."

"No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought."

"No atomic physicist has to worry; people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water."

"Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit -- not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal."

"No job too dirty for the scientists."

"Nobody's busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don't worry about what they're doing in South Korea and places like that. It's like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world who've got a lower standard of living? Most Americans would say yes. Now we ask the question, are you content to enjoy your political freedom at the expense of people who are less free? I think they would also say yes."

"No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death."

"Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it creative observation. Creative viewing."

"No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls."

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

"Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? And here is my good big centipede! If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race."

"Nothing happens by coincidence."

"Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning."

"Oh be careful! There they go again! said the old queen as his string broke spilling his balls over the floor.... Stop them will you, James, you worthless old shit! Don't just stand there and let the master's balls roll into the coal-bin!"

"Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief... Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louver! A bas l Originality, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol -- pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight."

"Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror."

"Open your mind and let the pictures out."

"O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time..."

"Paranoia is just having the right information."

"Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive."

"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."