"Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose."
— James Ellroy

"I have spent most of my life (like most people) avoiding transcendence at all costs, mainly because the shit hurts."
— Steve Earle

"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours"
— Bob Dylan (Lyrics:1962-2001)

"I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me."
— Bob Dylan

"Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean."
— Bob Dylan

"I think women rule the world and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn't allowed him to do or encouraged him to do."
— Bob Dylan

"When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it - don't back down and don't give up - then you're going to mystify a lot of folks."
— Bob Dylan

"All I can be is me- whoever that is. "
— Bob Dylan

"The truth was obscure,
Too profound and too pure,
To live it you had to explode"
— Bob Dylan

"Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues; you can tell by the way she smiles."
— Bob Dylan

"It's like my whole life never happened,
When I see you, it's as if I never had a thought.
I know this dream, it might be crazy,
But it's the only one I've got."
— Bob Dylan

"He not busy being born is busy dying."
— Bob Dylan

"Hey! I'm A Cherry Ghost!"
— Jeff Tweedy

"You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect."
— J.D. Salinger

"The most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid."
— J.D. Salinger (Nine Stories)

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality"
— T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)

"April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain."
— T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land)

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. "
— Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)

"I just saved your fucking life, Mom. . . . You could at least offer me an Oreo."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window."
— Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver)

"Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. "
— Hunter S. Thompson

"It never got weird enough for me."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"A word to the wise is infuriating. "
— Hunter S. Thompson

"America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century)

"In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing."
— Hunter S. Thompson (The Rum Diary: A Novel)

"It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old."
— Hunter S. Thompson (The Rum Diary: A Novel)

"I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still."
— Arthur Rimbaud (Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works)

"“But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.”"
— Arthur Rimbaud

""The only unbearble thing is that nothing is unbearable.""
— Arthur Rimbaud

"In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me."
— Arthur Rimbaud

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
"
— Elmore Leonard

"The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire"
— Hermann Hesse

"Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"You must find your dream...but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream."
— Hermann Hesse

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning."
— Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions)

"Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent."
— Neil Gaiman

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
— Leonard Cohen

"A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. "
— Leonard Cohen

"I don't remember
lighting this cigarette
and I don't remember
if I'm here alone
or waiting for someone."
— Leonard Cohen (Book of Longing)