The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.

I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

At my back I hear the word-"homosexual"-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.

For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.

The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs.