“A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”

“All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.”

“All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.”

“All of life is a foreign country.”

“All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.”

“Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.”

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”

“I don't really go out at all.”

“I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove.”

“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.”

“I really hate to write.”

“If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.”

“I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.”

“It's hard to write haiku. I write long, silly Indian poems.”

“Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.”

“My father and my mother and my sister and I have always voted Republican, always.”

“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”

“My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet.”

“My story is endless. I put in a teletype roll, you know, you know what they are, you have them in newspapers, and run it through there and fix the margins and just go, go - just go, go, go.”

“My witness is the empty sky.”

“Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.”

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”

“Symbolism is alright in 'fiction,' but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.”

“The only people for me are the mad ones: the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who... burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles.”

“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”