Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.

You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.

You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for.

Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.

Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.

Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own?