If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.

Wherever the crowd goes run in the other direction. They're always wrong.

places to hunt places to hide are getting harder to find, and pet canaries and goldfish too, did you notice that?

I didn't like anybody in that school. I think they knew that. I think that's why they disliked me. I didn't like the way they walked or looked or talked, but I didn't like my mother or father either. I still had the feeling of being surrounded by white empty space. There was always a slight nausea in my stomach.

I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.

Success is always dangerous. It can make an asshole out of anybody.

Why did I come here? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?