“If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone.”

The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.

Reading is more important than writing.

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it’s so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.

Nothing is ever behind us.

When you die of sorrow it’s as if you’ve broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over, cracked your skull. That’s sorrow.

You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn’t really happy.

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better.

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.

In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats

Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.

I’m an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.

They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn’t laugh or be sad with him.

Jello’s Biafra kind of like my weird, retarded uncle. He’s part of the family.

I collect things that just look retarded.

When I’m writing, I’m locking myself in a room. I’m the worst critic in the world. I write something and then I beat myself up. I’m like “Vin, you’re retarded, that makes no sense.”

I still love her. But she’s retarded, too.

Guys are kind of retarded until they’re about 30.

I got attention by being funny at school, pretending to be retarded, and jumping around with a deformed hand.

I resent having to prove that I’m not a retard.