“Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.”

There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.

One can hear all that’s going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what’s going on in this house.

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot — the sail he has seen.

Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.

The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.

Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world. One cannot commit evil in evil.

Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.

Creation is not a light-hearted game. The creator commits to a terrible adventure, which is to take up-on himself all of the dangers that his creatures run.

The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.

Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.

On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.

When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.

My own momma turned her back on me, and that’s my momma.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Fidelity – a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.

We ignore our feelings a lot, I realize. Many of us have to… until they really bite us in the butt.

In politics it is necessary either to betray one’s country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.

Anyone who claims that all religions are the same betrays not only an ignorance of all religions but also a caricatured view of even the best-known ones. Every religion at its core is exclusive.

People know when they’ve betrayed themselves. They are very much aware when they are not honest with themselves. They hear the voice that says, “You shouldn’t have said that” or “You know that’s not right.”