“I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are. ”

“As regards any specific book, I'm trying primarily to tell a story, in the most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive. But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do, taking my output ( the course of it) as a whole. I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world...........I'm trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period. I'm still trying to put it all, if possible on one pinhead. I don't know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep on trying in a new way................. life is a phenomenon but not a novelty, the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere and man stinks the same stink no matter where in time.”

“I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine.”

“About women? When I say soldiers I don't mean me. I wasn't no soldier anymore than a man that fixes watches is a watchmaker. And when I say women I don't mean you.”

“They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you aren’t good enough, worthy enough. It doesn’t die; you’re the the one that dies. It’s like the ocean: if you’re no good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die. You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear with no name to it, just this was for an epitaph”

“I don't care where I'm from. Nor where I'm going. From hell to hell.”

“Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.”