Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.

I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.

I can't sleep with you tonight, baby, my head's all messed up, you've no idea. It's somewhere else and it's full of voices and songs and bad things.

I guess writing is a kind of therapy in the sense that there are things you need to say and you say them, and better out than in.

Why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live. … Why can’t they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?

The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.

Security and safety were the reward of dullness.