“If there’s one thing you can say about mankind, there’s nothing kind about man.”

Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing with the air.

I’m always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you’re drowning, and it’s there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.

New York forces you to be in endless surreal situations.

I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We’re all looking at the wrapping. But we won’t tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath.

The trick is to have a career and have a family. It’s like having two dogs that hate each other and you have to take them for a walk every night.

I started out with nothing and I still got most of it left.

People get frightened that success is going to take them out of life. They’re no longer going to be on the corner of Bedlam and Squalor; life will only be something you can get through the mail.

There’s no prayer like desire.

Oh, I’m not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.

The beginning of it starts at the end.

Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, it’s just god when he’s drunk.

You got to tell me the brave captain Why are the wicked so strong? How do the angels get to sleep When the devil leaves the porch light on?

I’ve lost my equilibrium, my car keys, and my pride.

I’ve seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train.

You’re my North Star when I’m lost and feeling blue.

I don’t like the stigma that comes with being called a poet. So I call what I’m doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue.

I traded cowardice for cruelty; I traded weakness for ferocity.

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. –Blanche Dubois

There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.

Indians, of course, have no “theology,” and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.

Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty.

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.