Will Viharo > Will's Quotes

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it. ”
― Raymond Chandler

“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.”
― Raymond Chandler

“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”
― Raymond Chandler

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.”
― Damon Runyon, Runyon on Broadway

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.”
― Jim Thompson

“Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward.

It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity”
― Jim Thompson, The Getaway

“If we all had what we wanted to eat... We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“People tell me I live in the past. We all live in the past, I tell them, we just don't know it yet." ("Love Stories Are Too Violent For Me," Wild Card Press, 1995)”
― Will Viharo