Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.

Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.

Men to whom God is dead worship one another.

What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living.

I've never enjoyed myself. I'm incapable of enjoying myself. There's just some people who don't enjoy themselves very much.

If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you've been told.

God love the car. It has shown the naked heart that lives in all of us. Man invented the car but the car -- out of pure malevolence no doubt -- changed the history of the world by reinventing man.