“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.

Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.

All we have to do is get out and vote, while it’s still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.

God’s mercy on you degenerate swine.

I damn well intend to keep on living the way I think I should.