“[John] Belushi was an extreme experience even by my standards.”

“Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they’re not even very good.”

“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits”

“A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out.”

“After my bad experience as a kite, I simply refused to go about as a glowing Sadie-headed chicken. That’s fine for Carter, but I have standards.”

“Be extremely subtle even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate.”