• Frank Zappa:
  • "Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best."
  • "If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT."
  • "There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life."
  • "I believe that people have a right to decide their own destiny. People own themselves."
  • "A wise man once said, never discuss philosophy or politics in a disco environment."
  • "It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice – there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."
  • "Scientology, how about that? You hold on to the tin cans and then this guy asks you a bunch of questions, and if you pay enough money you get to join the master race. How's that for a religion?"
  • "The disgusting stink of a too loud electric guitar; now that's my idea of a good time."
  • "So, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, if you go for all these fairy tales, that 'evil' woman convinced the man to eat the apple, but the apple came from the Tree of Knowledge. And the punishment that was then handed down, the woman gets to bleed and the guy's got to go to work, is the result of a man desiring, because his woman suggested that it would be a good idea, that he get all the knowledge that was supposedly the property and domain of God. So, that right away sets up Christianity as an anti-intellectual religion. You never want to be that smart. If you're a woman, it's going to be running down your leg, and if you're a guy, you're going to be in the salt mines fo r the rest of your life. So, just be a dumb fuck and you'll all go to heaven. That's the subtext of Christianity."
  • "It’s better to have something to remember, than nothing to regret."
• Stephen King:
  • “The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst I think. When the secret stays locked within not for a want of a teller but for an understanding ear."
  • "Only enemies speak the truth. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty."
  • “It filled her eyes and her mind with the sort of clean, revelatory excitement that belongs only to the works of art that deeply move us – the song that made us cry, the story that made us see the world clearly from another’s perspective, at least for awhile, the poem that made us glad to be alive, the dance that made us forget for a few minutes that someday we will not be.”
  • “Some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice. But still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friend.”
• Chuck Palahniuk:
  • "Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit."
  • "We're the middle children of history.... no purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives."
  • "Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head."
  • "If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?"
  • "The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on."
  • "If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character... would you slow down? Or speed up?"
  • "Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct."
  • "The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly."
  • "You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless."
  • “I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, 'Why?' Why did I cause so much pain? Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, 'No, that's not right.' Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything."
  • "The joke is, we all have the same punch line."
  • "When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"
  • “Don't you get it? She's the house! She's the plain white shutters, the sparkling glass windows, and the perfect white picket fence. She's the ordinary stuff. But you... you're the red door. And when people come by, yeah, sure, they see the house. But for some reason, they always end up looking at the door. It's always in the corner of their eye. You can't ignore a red door. And the house is nice, hell, the house is perfect. But then there's that door. It's almost painful to look at. You're the door."
  • “She's just a regular person who's going to live and die ignored, obscure. Ordinary. That's not such a tragedy.”
  • “No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention.”
• Hunter S. Thompson:
  • "It's beautiful and clean and awe-inspiring on top But not many of us can walk on water. Not for long, anyway."
  • "I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate."
  • "The music business is a cruel and shallow trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side."
  • “Some may never live, but the crazy never die.”
  • “I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.”
  • “There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”
  • "You better take care of me, Lord. If you don't you're gonna have me on your hands.”
• Oscar Wilde:
  • "The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
  • “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
  • “When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
  • "No man is rich enough to buy back his past."
  • "This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last."
  • "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
  • “A dreamer is one who can only find their way by midnight, and their punishment is that they see the dawn before the rest of the world.”
• Mark Twain:
  • “There is nothing so annoying as to have two people talking when you're busy interrupting.”
  • "Let us endeavor to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."
  • “Clothes make the man. Naked

people have little or no influence in society.”

• “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.”
• “Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
• "I have never let my schooling get in the way of my education."
• “The human race has only one real effective weapon, and that is laughter.”
• "Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it."
• Albert Einstein:
  • "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
  • "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
• Friedrich Nietzsche:
  • “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
  • "We have art in order not to die of the truth."
  • “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
  • “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
• Douglas Adams:
  • "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
  • "If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now."
  • “He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
• Walt Disney:
  • "When you lose somebody, you think you've lost the whole world as well. But that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window and once you do, you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there, still. There are the same apple trees, and the same song birds. And over our heads, the same very sky that shines like heaven. So far above us, that we can never hope to reach such heights."
  • "Too many people grow up. That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. They don't remember what it's like to be twelve years old. They patronize, they treat children as inferiors. Well, I won't do that."
• Gore Vidal:
  • "The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so."
  • "Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."
  • “Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically be disqualified from ever doing so.”
  • “Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for president. One hopes it is the same half.”
  • “‘Politics’ is made up of two words, ‘poli,’ which is Greek for ‘many,’ and ‘tics,’ which are blood-sucking insects."
• John Lennon:
  • "You're born in pain. And pain is what we're in most of the time. And I think that the bigger the pain, the more gods we need."
  • "If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal."
  • "Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it."
  • “I always was a rebel, but on the other hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted, and not just a loudmouth, lunatic, poet, musician. But I cannot be what I am not.”
  • “Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”
• Lewis Carroll
  • "I often give myself very good advice but I very seldom take it."
  • “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
• Kurt Vonnegut Jr.:
  • “There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.”
  • "Those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand."
  • "How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."
  • "No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful."
  • "I urge you to please notice when you are happy and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
  • “Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”
• Jack Kerouac:
  • "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify them, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."
  • "I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted."
• Bill Hicks
  • “Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.”
• Charles Bukowski:
  • "We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
  • "Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live."
  • “Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn.”
• Andy Warhol:
  • "Everybody winds up kissing the wrong person goodnight."
  • "I never fall apart because I never fall together."
• Bob Dylan:
  • "Have you ever been with someone when your hearts were beating in the same rhythm? That's true love. A man and a woman with their hearts beating together are truly lucky, then you've really been in love. You might see that person once a month, once a year, one a lifetime, but you have the guarantee your lives are going to be in rhythm, that's all you need."
• Oliver Wendell Holmes:
  • "Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall."
• Tolstoy
  • “One moment a spark of hope gleams, the next a sea of despair rages; and always the pain, the pain, always the anguish, the same thing on and on.”
• Rudyard Kipling:
  • "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."
• Elizabeth Wurtzel:
  • "There will always be this deficit, this flabby remainder of self hanging over me, demanding more attention than I and seventy-two other people put together could possibly satisfy. What I wouldn't do to be Alice, climbing through the looking glass, taking one of those pills that makes you small, so small. What I wouldn't do to be less."
  • “I mean, I don’t know if there are any statistics on this, but how long is a person who is on psychotropic drops supposed to live? How long before your brain, not to mention the rest of you, will begin to mush and deteriorate? I don’t think chronically depressed psychotic people tend to make it to the nursing-home-in-Florida phase of life. Or do they? And which is worse: to live that long in this condition or to die young and stay pretty?”
  • “And I think if I don’t comply, maybe the men in white coats will come with a straitjacket and take me away, a thought that is momentarily comforting and ultimately, like everything else, horrifying.”
  • “No one would tell her what was wrong with her. She would just lie in her bed, staring at pink walls, taking pink pills that the nurse in white would give her. Between the green pills and the yellow ones. And all those blues.”
  • “It's much too late and I'm so sure that they are still not listening. They still don't know that they need to do more and more and more, they need to try to get through to me until they haven't slept or eaten or breathed fresh air for days, they need to try until they've died for me. They have to suffer as I have. And even after they've done that, there will still be more. They will have to rearrange the order of the cosmos, they will have to end the cold war, they will have to cure hunger in Ethiopia and end the sex-slave trade in Thailand and stop torture in Argentina. They will have to do more than they ever though they could if they want me to stay alive.”
  • “Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant.”
• e.e. cummings:
  • "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
  • "It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
• Stephen Chbosky:
  • "I am very interested and fascinated by how everyone loves each other, but nobody really likes each other."
  • “Things change. Friends leave. And life doesn’t stop for anyone.”
  • "I don't want to start thinking again. Not like I have this last week. I can't think again. Not ever again. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That's why I'm trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning."
• Flaubert
  • “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
• Jean de la Bruyère
  • “There are but three events in a man's life: birth, life, and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.”
• J.D. Salinger
  • "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though."
• Arthur Miller
  • “Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”
• Sir Richard Francis Burton
  • "The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that the man never worshiped anything but himself."
• Aldous Huxley:
  • "Maybe this world is another planet's hell."
• Frank Lloyd Wright:
  • "I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."
• Nelson DeMille:
  • "Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face."
• Gil Bellows:
  • "If you have a place in your mind or in your heart that you can go to in spite of everything in your life and feel ease, peace - bliss, even - then they don't have you."
• J.K. Rowling:
  • "Some wounds run too deep for healing."
  • "Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open."
  • “Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”
• Hebbel
  • “Nothing great in this world was achieved without passion.”
• Bill Maher
  • "I think religion is a neurological disorder."
  • "The bible looks like it started out as a game of mad libs."
• Barbara W. Tuchman
  • “Books are humanity in print.”
• Juan Ramon Jimenez
  • “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."
• Lucius Annaeus Seneca
  • "Sometimes even to live is an act of courage."
• Steven Weinberg
  • "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
• Javan
  • “Love can sometimes be magic, but magic can sometimes just be an illusion.”
• P.J. O'Rourke:
  • "Drugs have taught an entire generation of American kids the metric system."
• Henry Rollins:
  • "It's sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew."
• Jimi Hendrix:
  • "Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music."
• Kurt Cobain:
  • "No amount of effort can save you from oblivion."
• Marilyn Monroe:
  • "People change so you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you can appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together."
• Ambrose Bierce:
  • "Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret."
• David Sedaris:
  • "Seven beers followed by two scotches and a thimble of marijuana and its funny how sleep comes all on its own."
• Elie Weisel:
  • “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
• Robert Frost:
  • "Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."
• Groucho Marx:
  • "I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
• Stephen Crane:
  • A Man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the Universe, "The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
• Roald Dahl:
  • "And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."
• Ryszard Kapuscinski:
  • “When man meets an obstacle he can't destroy, he destroys himself.”
• Marilyn Manson:
  • "No matter how much they love you, they want a tragedy."
• Mick Mars:
  • "Living is my favorite sin."
• Ernest Hemingway:
  • "Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
• Voltaire:
  • "Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game."
• Francois Rabelais:
  • "What cannot be cured must be endured."
• Bob Marley:
  • "Truth is everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for."
• Robert Frost:
  • "In three words I can sum up everything about life: it goes on."
• Emiliano Zapata:
  • “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
• George Bernard Shaw:
  • "Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs."
• Quentin Crisp
  • "I learned very early in life that I was always going to need people a little more than they needed me."