Get yourself in that extreme state of being next to madness. You should always write with an erection. Even if you're a woman.

The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.

salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.

You should never hesitate to trade your cow for a handful of magic beans.

Sometimes one gets the feeling that life still thinks it's living in Paris in the '30s.

So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.

They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.