Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.
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.
The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.
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.
Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.
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.
There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.
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 do to do afterward.
To be is to do - Socrates To do is to be - Sartre Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra
1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.
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.
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding. For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I'm kidding. We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding. If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
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.