Technique is nothing more than failed style.

It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.

Don’t sleep with people who don’t read.

My idea of an interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a career.

True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.

Without obsession, life is nothing.

[My catholic education] sticked with me. It caused the rage I had to make 'Pink Flamingos.'

Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.

Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites, yearning to become the role models for others we know we could never be for ourselves?

I like hard movies; I like ones that are basically the opposite of a date movie.

The "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" hitchhiker really made people never want to hitchhike again - the hitcher, the show. Hitchhiking is always vaguely sexual.

Maybe what this is. What we have, is something that will save us from ourselves.

I am an atheist and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.

I liked being with the books: they reminded me of how many ways of thinking existed outside my own - how small and fleeting my pulse was when set alongside those ageing spines.

People don't expect to die tomorrow, but they do take out insurance, don't they?

I didn't accomplish what I set out to do, but I realized I had set out to do the wrong things

I showed up in L.A. with $500 and a backpack and I stayed at a shelter, so nobody handed me anything. I worked for every single thing that I have.

In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted.

In the next life you will be working with those attitudes that are now yours.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

People always ask me about the intent of witchcraft and what it is used for. The answer in 'white' covens is simple: it is to be use the powers for good amongst the circle and its friends.