“Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.”

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.

I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn’t make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.

Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever?

Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ‘I want to see the manager.’

I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren’t cute at all, and if they are cute they very rapidly outgrow it.

Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts.

(1) Never give anything away for nothing. (2) Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). (3) Always take everything back if you possibly can.

Language is a virus from outer space.

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

Too perfect to be sexually attractive.

There’s no place for impractical dreamers around here.

You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest-lived.

I don’t think Chris realized he was in a band until 2001. He all of a sudden woke up one day and realized he was in a band. He thought he was just recording my solo project. Three albums later, we’re in Baltimore trying to figure out what to do with ourselves.

The Hank Williams Syndrome: Come to Nashville, write some good songs, cut some hit records, make money, take all the drugs you can and drink all you can, become a wild man and all of a sudden die.

Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it is simply a matter of blind faith.

Competition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings.

A mien which seems to say, “You are looking at somebody now.” For this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

Once Michael gets up there he says, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just hang up here in the air for a while, just sit back.’ Then all of a sudden, he says, ‘Well, maybe I’ll 360.