I do not wish to grow old, to outlive my illusions. Only a short respite from cares and sorrow, a brief time of flowers, and music, and love, and laughter, and ecstatic tears.
The closer I'm bound in love to you, the closer I am to free.
The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.
Fear paints pictures of ghosts and hangs them in the gallery of ignorance.
Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.
We rise by lifting others.
The Emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered his wife Fausta, and his eldest son Crispus, the same year that he convened the Council of Nice to decide whether Jesus Christ was a man or the Son of God. The council decided that Christ was consubstantial with the father. This was in the year 325. We are thus indebted to a wife-murderer for settling the vexed question of the divinity of the Savior.
Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them. . . with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society and that general fairness which cements mankind.
Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express.
Your work is the single greatest means at your disposal for expressing your social intelligence.
Failure: the renewable resource.