“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”

― William Faulkner

"The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men. And then the sacred "will of the people" becomes blinder, baser, colder and more dangerous than the will of any tyrant.

When the will of the people becomes the sum of the weakness of a multitude of weak men, it is time to make a break.

So today. Society consists of a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible imaginary evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bringing the evil into being."

-- D.H. Lawrence

“Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.”

― Frank Lloyd Wright

“The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears.”

—Hunter S. Thompson

"I'd tell them to have an unhappy love
affair, hemorrhoids, bad teeth
and to drink cheap wine,
avoid opera and golf and chess,
to keep switching the head of their
bed from wall to wall
and then I'd tell them to have
another unhappy love affair
and never to use a silk typewriter
ribbon,
avoid family picnics
or being photographed in a rose
garden;
read Hemingway only once,
skip Faulkner
ignore Gogol
stare at photographs of Gertrude Stein
and read Sherwood Anderson in bed
while eating Ritz crackers,
realize that people who keep
talking about sexual liberation
are more frightened than you are..."

-- Charles Bukowski

“Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad, for any other goodness is usually merely inertia or lack of will-power.”

—La Rochefoucauld

"For some reason, it was the fate of America not to become itself, not to build its house upon the foundation of a loss for which no recovery was possible. Its fate, rather, was to sacrifice its freedom to nationhood, to reiterate and exasperate the rage for possession, and to fall into the watery mire of what is not life.

Instead of a nation of poets, it became a nation of debtors, property owners, shopkeepers, spectators, gossipers, traffickers in rumor, prejudice, and information-capitalists who, in their strange uncertainty about life, pursue the delusions of recovery in their appropriation of everything."

-- Robert Pogue Harrison

“Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.”

― Michel Houellebecq

“This is the perfect description of the 'automatic cultural man'—man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car or works his electric toothbrush.”

~ Ernest Becker

"The noose tightens ever more around the few who are still capable of great disgust and great rebellion."

— Julius Evola

“I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.”

—Anne Sexton

“I tangled with
the world to
let it go
but couldn't free

it: so I made
words
to wrestle in my
stead and went

off silent to
the quick flow
of brooks, the
slow flow of stone.”

—A. R. Ammons

“The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.”

-- Emil Cioran

"I don’t believe in health foods and diets either. I have probably been eating all the wrong things all my life — and have thrived on it. I eat to enjoy my food. Whatever I do I do first for enjoyment.

I don’t believe in regular checkups. If there is something wrong with me I’d rather not know about it, because then I would only worry about it and aggravate the condition.

Nature often remedies our ills better than the doctor can. I don’t believe there is any prescription for long life. Besides, who wants to live to be a hundred?

What’s the point of it?

A short life and a merry one is far better than a long life sustained by fear, caution, and perpetual medical surveillance."

-- Henry Miller

Beauty is vanishing from our world becaue we live as though it did not matter.

-- Roger Scruton

"I can't watch TV longer than five minutes without praying for nuclear holocaust."

~ Bill Hicks

"I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere."

~ Leonard Cohen

"We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

-- Bukowski

“If anything about the present century is certain, it is that the power conferred on ‘humanity’ by new technologies will be used to commit atrocious crimes against it.

Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can do so only because they ignore history. Pogroms are as old as Christendom…

There is a deeper reason why ‘humanity’ will never control technology. Technology is not something that humankind can control. It is an event that has befallen the world.”

— John Gray, Straw Dogs

"Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology.

The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom."

~ Murray Bookchin

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

― E.O. Wilson