“I pretend to understand because I don't want anybody to be hurt”

“I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I don’t want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta.No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there.”

“God knows I am not too hippy. Perhaps because I am too much around the hip and I fear fads for, like anybody else, I like something that tends to last.”

“There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get outbut I'm too tough for him,I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.”

“Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.”

“beware the average man the average woman beware their love, their love is average seeks average but there is genius in their hatred there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you to kill anybody not wanting solitude not understanding solitude they will attempt to destroy anything that differs from their own not being able to create art they will not understand art they will consider their failure as creators only as a failure of the world”

“and now sometimes I'm interviewed, they want to hear aboutlife and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,"look, lookat this!"but they don't understand, they say something like,"yousay you've been influenced by Celine?"no," I hold the cat up,"by what happens, bythings like this, by this, by this!”