I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

John Barleycorn's inhibition rises like a wall between
one's immediate desires and long-learned morality.

Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living!

You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to take care of himself in a mass-fight against him; and how, on a single dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of time.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do write.

You stand on dead men's legs. You've never had any of your own. You couldn't walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly.

Bog-lights, vapours of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations -- this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your book shelves.

Life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.

He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.

I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with a drink.

Insanity? The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Where is the line between wrong mind and sane mind? It is inconceivable that any sane man can radically disagree with one's most sane conclusions.

At once he became an enigma. One side or the other of his nature was perfectly comprehensible; but both sides together were bewildering.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather be a streaming meteor than a sleepy and permanent planet. I would rather burn out in a blaze of streaming glory than be stifled like dry rot. I shall use my time.

The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. There is not a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not despise.

Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.