A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.

Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC

How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?

The champagne was dead. So it goes.

There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.

I had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.

The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.

I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is.

Sordid things, for the most part, are what make human beings, my father included, move. That's what it is to be human, I'm afraid.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.