“If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.”

He had that rare weird electricity about him – that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving normally.

If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix.

There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.

It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.

I’m a word freak. I like words. I’ve always compared writing to music. That’s the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it’s like music.

I was never trying, necessarily, to be an outlaw. It was just the place in which I found myself.

There is no story unless you’ve written it.

Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don’t tell them anything.

Writing is the flip side of sex – it’s good only when it’s over.

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.

On some nights, I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.

As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK – it’s a decent day.

For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth.

Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.