Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.

I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.