“So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.”

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.

Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.

You are quite unnecessary, young man!

I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.

I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.

Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

Sorrows, as storms, bring down the clouds close to the earth; sorrows bring heaven down close; and they are instruments of cleansing and purifying.

This much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

I guess for my skin, I clean it and moisturize and try to drink water. How boring is this though? I’m convinced that it comes from within. If you’re happy and healthy, it shows.

The game of baseball is a clean, straight game.

The game of baseball is a clean, straight game, and it summons to its presence everybody who enjoys clean, straight athletics. It furnishes amusement to the thousands and thousands.

I cleaned up my act, and I made this rap thing work for me. I thought people would respect me for that. But instead, it’s, ‘Oh, he’s sold all these records, and now he thinks he’s all that.’

You need to be as clean of a slate as you can be, as an actor. You have to try to be open to every experience.

You have the clean canvas of a whole week before you. Paint well.