The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.

I seldom know what I'm going to write when I sit down. There isn't much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.

LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.

I pretend to understand because I don't want anybody to be hurt

dogs and angels are not very far apart