the grace is being able to like rock music, symphony music, jazz … anything that contains the original energy of joy.

Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.

First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L.A. Public Library.

You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it.

Pull a string, a puppet moves ... each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand - and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha ... can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know.

If you can hit a guy once, you can hit him twice.