“I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.”

I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.

When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.

The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.

in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.

When you make a bet, you’re saying something.

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets’ nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.

Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.

You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest; outside, the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business.

I’m good at reading people.

It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.

Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.

He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.

There’s no need to explain anything at length. Let go of love and hate and let things be. That’s all that I do in my own practice.

If I were to write anything at all, it would turn out to be nothing but talk about movies. In other words, take ‘myself,’ subtract ‘movies,’ and the result is ‘zero.’

By not asking too much, you can believe in almost anything..like..a starry night in the mountains, or even the existence of fate.

Anything you make has its own wavelength and its own sound. It’s like a tuning fork, until the things that resonate are correct for it.

Cease to sin, because you will not meet Allah with anything [as valuable] as few sins.

I can read people, and if the other person doesn’t want to say anything,

When we cannot look around and explain anything we are the quantum world.

Negotiation talks are the best way to solve anything. We must replace wars and weapons with negotiations and talks.