“If I had my way we’d sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.”

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.

I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.

I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

I’m creating an imaginary — it’s always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.

What a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. Hopeless rubbish.

As soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.

There are no innocent bystanders, What are they doing there in the first place?

If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you’ve lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.

It’s hard to go out in front of people with an acoustic guitar and improvise for 30 or 40 minutes, but I had a compulsion to do it. I just had to in a way that I can’t really explain.

Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.

A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader’s eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.

Everything is getting bigger. The way to go now is to program in a little more sophistication.

Being Number One isn’t everything to me, but for those few hours on the court it’s way ahead of whatever’s in second place.

I feel that I’ve often pointed out that there are countless aspects of life and nature that scientists and scientific thinkers cannot explain.

Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics – religion, death, existentialism – to the screen. … But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He’s like a miner digging in search of purity.

I am a firm believer in if you can’t get it the old fashioned way, you don’t need it.