What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft...a kind of breaking through to glory.

Look at them. There are your true philosophers. I think that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else.

for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments.

No single organism could be understood without observing and comprehending the entire colony.

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.