To know Paris is to know a great deal.

But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.

Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation... The other eight are unimportant.

New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.

The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.

Work on one thing at a time until finished.