“There is something fresh and crisp about the first hours of a Caribbean day, a happy anticipation that something is about to happen, maybe just up the street or around the next corner.”

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

He had that rare weird electricity about him – that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving normally.

If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix.

There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.

It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.

I’m a word freak. I like words. I’ve always compared writing to music. That’s the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it’s like music.

I was never trying, necessarily, to be an outlaw. It was just the place in which I found myself.

There is no story unless you’ve written it.

Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don’t tell them anything.

Writing is the flip side of sex – it’s good only when it’s over.

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.

On some nights, I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.

As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK – it’s a decent day.

For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth.

The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.

The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.

A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.

What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won’t come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me–a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.