“If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.”

It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness

It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

Kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer.

All literature is protest.

Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible… Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world.

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged.

It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it.

The locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the ells and the screams that filled the air.

No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.

I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

Things are changing at such a rate that you really can’t get too familiar with anything that you own in relation to what sort of functionality it has in your life.

People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.

Is it possible that software is not like anything else.

To do anything to a high level, it has to be total obsession.

I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a ‘learning experience.’ Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a ‘learning experience.’ It makes me feel less stupid.

I did stand-up, weird and ignorant stuff about my career – anything for a laugh.