“He said you were the only one who was bitter about S’s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.”

Listen, if you’re not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.

Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.

It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.

You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.

I’m up to my ears in unwritten words.

I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do.

I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

How long should a man’s legs be? Long enough to touch the ground.

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.

I’m one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes.

I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

I just hope that one day – preferably when we’re both blind drunk – we can talk about it.

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

If you knew Jesus was coming tomorrow, what would you do today? Then do it!

Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner

When Satan tells me I am a sinner he comforts me immeasurably, since Christ died for sinners.

I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware.

Fascism is capitalism plus murder.

My father was against the death penalty, and that was hard in the Son of Sam summer when fear was driving the desire for the death penalty.

Theirs is not to make reply: Theirs is not to reason why: Theirs is but to do and die.