The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.

I'd still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy.

Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time.

It is vice to go to bed with someone you are not married to or have someone of your own sex or to get money for having sex with someone who does not appeal to you-incidentally, the basis of half the marriages of my generation.

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.