“Never fire a warning shot. It is a waste of ammunition.”

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.

All we have to do is get out and vote, while it’s still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.

The real challenge is not to face the world outside, but to take the first step in challenging yourself. That is my motto every time I prepare against my opponents.

My debut upon the world’s stage occurred on February 26th, 1845.

No one knows how bad this hurts and I won’t tell them Cause I know I’m going to stay and I don’t feel like being judged for it.

The best “place and time” for a new beginning is “here and now”

There comes a time in the life of every nation when it stands at the crossroads of history and must choose which way to go.

The paradox of our times is that those who have the most can often be the least satisfied.

I was taught to put my best into anything I did and I can honestly say I’ve always done that. Still, there are many times when I failed, when I was disappointed.

If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.