“The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.”

“It’s like a man in the trenchesagain: he doesn’t know any more why he should go on living, becauseif he escapes now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on justthe same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and hasadmitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even justhis bare nails, and he’ll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he’dslaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why.”

“At no time in the history of man has the world been so full of pain and anguish. Here and there, however, we meet with individuals who are untouched, unsullied, by the common grief. We say of them that they have died to the world. They live in the moment, fully, and the radiance which emanates from them is a perpetual song of joy […] like the clown, we go through the motions, forever simulating, forever postponing the grand event- we die struggling to get born. We never were, never are. We are always in the process of becoming. Forever outside”

“What seems nasty, painful, evil can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.”

“I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with it’s painful gall-stones, it’s gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul...”

“The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can life the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.”

“...and with that he began to laugh, not a laugh either, but a cackle, a hideous cackle like a rooster with its head on the block. It got him so badly that he had to stop and hold his guts; the tears were streaming down his eyes and between the cackles he let out the most terrible heartrending sobs.”