I am ashamed to be a member of the human race but I don't want to add any more to that shame, I want to scrape a little of it off.

pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more.

Don’t do it. Don’t love me.

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

Belane, are you nuts?" Who knows? Insanity is comparative. Who sets the norm?

They have no idea that it can be done by a bus driver, a field hand, or a fry cook. They have no idea where it comes from. It comes from pain, damnation and impossibility. The blow to the soul of the gut. It comes from getting burned and seared and slugged. It comes from...new and awful places and the same old places.

Somebody at one of these places asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You "don't try". That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like it's looks, you make a pet out of it.