I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.
Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.
I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove.
All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.
The only people for me are the mad ones: the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who... burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles.
The Catholic Church is a weird church. Much mysticism is sown broadspread from its ritual mysteries till it extends into the very lives of its constituents and parishoners.
I'm really Wallace Beery in 'The Champ.'
Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.
If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
All of life is a foreign country.
All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
My story is endless. I put in a teletype roll, you know, you know what they are, you have them in newspapers, and run it through there and fix the margins and just go, go - just go, go, go.
A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.
Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too.
My father and my mother and my sister and I have always voted Republican, always.
Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.