"We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.. "
— Osacr Wilde

"[...] 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 never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

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

"When the going gets weird the weird turn professional."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72)

"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. "
— William S. Burroughs

"Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing."
— William S. Burroughs

"I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it."
— William S. Burroughs

""Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction." "
— William S. Burroughs

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. "
— Charles Bukowski

"those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that."
— Charles Bukowski

"Great art is horseshit, buy tacos."
— Charles Bukowski

"What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability."
— Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye: A Novel)

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
— Oscar Wilde

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
— Oscar Wilde

"I am not young enough to know everything."
— Oscar Wilde

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
— Oscar Wilde

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
— Oscar Wilde

"Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
— Oscar Wilde

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"I can resist anything, except temptation."
— Oscar Wilde

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."
— Oscar Wilde

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."
— Oscar Wilde

"Every woman is a rebel."
— Oscar Wilde

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them."
— Oscar Wilde

"Youth is wasted on the young."
— Oscar Wilde

"One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything."
— Oscar Wilde

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."
— Oscar Wilde

"To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable."
— Oscar Wilde

"I like men who have a future and women who have a past."
— Oscar Wilde

"Before i'd touch a square bitch's slit,
I'd suck a thousand clappy pricks and swim through liquid shit,
They got green puke bewtween their rotten toes,
And snot runs from their funky nose,
I hope square bitches become syphiliitic wrecks,
I hope they fall through their own assholes and break their mother-f#cking necks"
— Iceberg Slim (Pimp: The Story of My Life)

""I can serve in heaven cause I reigned in hell""
— The Dictators band

"I can serve in heaven cause I reigned in hell"
— The Dictators band

"I know it sounds lame, but I have to feel you get me. My whole fucking life, I pretended I could relate to chicks so I could get into their pants. Then once I got in, all I wanted was out again."
— Jerry Stahl (Plainclothes Naked)

"I'm wearing a diaper. Right now."
— Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight: A Memoir)

"“Joseph Mattson writes like a guitar player with nineteen fingers—everywhere at once, stinging, dark and beautiful. Empty the Sun will take you to some strange places, but the trip is amazing. Mattson has written a truly inventive and vivid novel.”"
— Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight and I, Fatty

"I did not mean to sodomize Dick Cheney.

I mean, I’m not even gay. Not that it matters. Because when, to my surprise, I bumped into him — literally — at the counter of Heimler’s Guns and Ammo in Casper, something clicked. And I’m not talking about the safety on my Mauser.

You see, there’s another side to “L’il Dickens,” as the VP liked to refer to himself. Or, at least, a certain part of himself. En privado, he’s tender. He’s funny. He’s pink. And he’s a gun man, just like me.

Rest of article here"
— Jerry Stahl

"The part of his mind that considered odds and consequences had shut down entirely, snuffed by the sheer adrenal rush of holding her, falling together into the Impala's sunken upholstery. He took her face in his hands as he kissed her, wanting to just get it right, to stamp the moment, to blunt the thunder of fear pounding in his skull as the rest of him succumbed to a sensation beyond pleasure, a kind of twisted relief that he'd macheted all his moorings, that whatever happened now would happen because he'd said 'Fuck It' to everything that had rendered him, for more years than he could count, a soul-dead, heart-numbed misfit staggering from pill to pill just to get through the dull risk of his own existence."
— Jerry Stahl (Plainclothes Naked)

"Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death."
— William S. Burroughs