The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.
No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.
Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'
Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.
How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.
Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.
Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.
I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.
In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.
Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
Thinking is not enough. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any... thing.
Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.
Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.
An addict never stops growing. Stupider.
Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
