“Mothers are all slightly insane.”

You don’t have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.

I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don’t. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it’s a stupid question.

I can be quite sarcastic when I’m in the mood.

Did you ever get fed up?’ I said. ‘I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?

Sleep tight, ya morons!

Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.

She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

Don’t hate me because I can’t remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else.

It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.

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.

Know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.

I don’t even know what I was running for—I guess I just felt like it.

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid.

In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

One is more certain to influence men, to produce more effect on them, by absurdities than by sensible ideas.

I have to live my life. I have a family and I just think it’s absurd to let other people influence the way you live.

To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.

Success make these people mad I know how it is.

A madman’s ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.

Yes, I am here. And you are lucky to be here too after all the absurd things you’ve done since you left home.

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.