The worst kind of censorship is the kind that takes place in your own mind before you sit down to a typewriter.

We've established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived... and people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal nothing!

Don't think of it as art, think of it as work.

I'm not a great writer. I'm a great rewriter.

I don't know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about truth. I just want to know the momentary fact of things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual. It's sensual. It's alive!

I'm a human being, god-dammit. My life has value!

All my brothers, my brothers-in-law, they're always telling me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you get to be a real professor of pain.