“It's my duty as a human being to be pissed off”

“I mean, what kind of literature do you think ants would make if they could read? Not F. Scott Fuckin’ Fitzgerald, not Joyce or D-D—D-Dostoyevsky, not even friggin’ Steinbeck. Wouldn’t make any sense to ’em. You ever read Nabokov’s Lolita? Best book of the twentieth century, but old-fashioned my friend, old fuckin’ fashioned. Same old story over and over again, one more guy mesmerized by his own dick, wandering around the wreckage of his life. Who the fuck cares about that? Give me the Knights of the Round Table! Give me Merlin! Or better, the “wine dark sea”! Much more interesting.”

“At least I admit that I don't know. I know that things are fucked up, beyond belief, and I have nothing original to say about it.”

“My definition of Blues is that it's a musical form which is very disciplined and structured coupled with a state of mind, and you can have either of those things but it's the two together that make it what it is. And you need to be a student for one, and a human being for the other, but those things alone don't do it.”

“When I was in third grade--the age of many of the boys here--my parents had debated whether or not to buy me a pair of [special soccer shoes]...Here in Bolivia most of the kids played in bare feet, and they had as much fun as we ever had. Alone, human beings can feel hunger. Alone, we can feel cold. Alone, we can feel pain. To feel poor, however, is something that we do only in comparison to others. I took off my shoes.”

“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours”

“4 of us, and 2000 of them. Piss-poor odds. For them.”