“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

Structure is more important than content in the transmission of information.

Usually when you ask somebody in college why they are there, they’ll tell you it’s to get an education. The truth of it is, they are there to get the degree so that they can get ahead in the rat race. Too many college radicals are two-timing punks. The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.

When decorum is repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out.

Fantasy is the only truth.

The work that the kids saw around them was so odious, so boring, so worthless that they came to regard WORK as the only dirty four-letter word in the English language.

The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it. The second duty is to eat breakfast. I ain’t going.

Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them.

Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.

Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.

Nostalgia is a form of depression both for a society and an individual.

It’s too late. We can’t win, they’ve gotten too powerful.

Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.

It’s going to be a combination Scopes trial, revolution in the streets, Woodstock Festival and People’s Park, all rolled into one.

Never impose your language on people you wish to reach.

Random political acts produce random political results. Why waste even a rock?

Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps.

On a day when these things shall be heated in hell-fire, and their foreheads, and their sides, and their backs shall be branded therewith.

I like to isolate myself when I work because I end up losing my voice by doing interviews all day.

The world gets better every day – then worse again in the evening.

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.

We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

And then you walk into a room one day, whether it’s at university or an office or some kind of club, and you just go, ‘Ah. There they are.’ And suddenly you feel at home.

I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years; I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.