“We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we’re doing, if we’re selling it, if the listener likes us.”

To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.

I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.

A bedroom is just as nice as whoever sleeps in it with you.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

An artist must believe in himself – Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence – but passionately.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing.

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life–live!”

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love.

Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.

Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.

When nations are to perish in their sins, ’tis in the Church the leprosy begins.

That’s not an accident that Donald Trump didn’t begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing the first African-American president of the United States.

Hank had left me his doomed army, and hed left marcie his inheritance. Unfair didnt begin to cover it.

Your power ends where your fear begins.

He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

I mean, I think we’re put here on earth to make your own destiny, to begin with.

To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.