Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.

Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.

To be an artist — actually, to be a human being in these times — it’s all difficult. … What matters is to know what you want and pursue it.

A good artist's always got his hand in his zipper.

My mother loved rock and roll. She loved high-energy music.

That whole thing about masturbating. Most girls, I guess nobody has to tell them, they just figure it out. I had to be told. Some girl actually had to show me a hairbrush and demonstrate exactly what to do. I just never figured that stuff out naturally.

Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.