“Experience can dull. With most men experience is a series of mistakes; the more experience you have the less you know.”
“That's what friendship is, sharing the prejudice of experience.”
“Style is the answer to everything.A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thingTo do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without itTo do a dangerous thing with style is what I call artBullfighting can be an artBoxing can be an artLoving can be an artOpening a can of sardines can be an artNot many have styleNot many can keep styleI have seen dogs with more style than men,although not many dogs have style.Cats have it with abundance.When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,that was style.Or sometimes people give you styleJoan of Arc had styleJohn the BaptistJesusSocratesCaesarGarcía Lorca.I have met men in jail with style.I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.”
“To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.”
“Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game -it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone.”
“The area dividing the brain and the soul Is affected in many ways by experience --Some lose all mind and become soul:insane.Some lose all soul and become mind:intellectual.Some lose both and become:accepted.”
“You can’t beat death butyou can beat death in life, sometimes.and the more often you learn to do it,the more light there will be.your life is your life.know it while you have it.”