What I want is to halt evolution, to go backward down the path we have taken, back to the world before childhood, to regress, regress, regress, further and further, until we get to the place we have only lately left behind, where culture and civilization do not figure. It is time we start to think, to feel, to see the universe in a way that is uncultivated, primitive--but this is also without a doubt the most difficult thing in the world to do.

It may be that my works are not literary. Call them whatever you like. I couldn't care less!

To be born in the street means to wander all your life, to be free. It means accident and incident, drama, movement. It means above all dream. A harmony of irrelevant facts which gives to your wandering a metaphysical certitude . . . What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

We need their paper boxes, their buttons, their synthetic furs, their rubber goods, their hosiery, their plastic this and that. We need the banker, his genius for taking our money and making himself rich. The insurance man, his policies, and his talk of security, of dividends--we need him too. Do we? I don't see that we need any of these vultures.

If you stop still and look at things . . . the world looks absolutely crazy to you. And it is crazy, by God! . . . From the time you wake up until the moment you go to bed it's all a lie, all a sham and a swindle.

Everywhere the grim, monotonous walls loomed up; behind them lived families whose whole life centered about a job. Industrious, patient, ambitious slaves whose one aim was emancipation. In the interim putting up with anything; oblivious of discomfort, immune to ugliness. Heroic little souls whose very obsession to liberate themselves from the thraldom of work served only to magnify the squalor and the misery of their lives.

Strange as it may seem today to say, the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Meaningful acts require no stir. When things are going to rack and ruin the most purposeful act may be to sit still.

We [Americans] take to dope, the dope which is worse by far than opium or hashish--I mean the newspapers, the radio, the movies. Real dope gives you the freedom to dream your own dreams; the American kind forces you to swallow the perverted dreams of men whose only ambition is to hold their job regardless of what they are bidden to do.

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.

I've known it all. Every humiliation, degradation, poverty, starvation

Don't look for miracles. YOU are the miracle.