“I was sixteen then, and I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen. Sometimes, I act a lot older than I am–I really do. But people never notice it. People never notice anything.”

You think of the book you’d most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.

I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.

I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.

You don’t know how to talk to people you don’t like. Don’t love, really. You can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.

You can’t stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.

I could happily lie down and die sometimes.

Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion.

And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I’d probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.

All morons hate it when you call them a moron.

People are always ruining things for you.

People are mostly hot to have a discussion when you’re not.

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

There are nice things in the world – and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked.

Sometimes you get tired of riding in taxicabs the same way you get tired riding in elevators. All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far or how high up.

I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.

I was five years old the first time I got drunk.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

Everyone desires long life, not one old age.

A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.

Female beauties are as fickle in their faces as in their minds; though casualties should spare them, age brings in a necessity of decay.

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.