A functioning police state needs no police. In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers. Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning. The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits. Like Spain, I am bound to the past. Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer. Language is a virus from outer space.

Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear. No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought. My relationships with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance. Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm? Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.' How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven. No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death. Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole. If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.

In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling. Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror. Like all pure creatures, cats are practical. Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.

As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary. Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has. Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo - and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way. There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve. Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.

I began to get a feeling... of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact. Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage. Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal.
Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered. When you stop growing you start dying. Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller.

Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will. The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values. The face of evil is always the face of total need. Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction. The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war. A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on. You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence. There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place? There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity. After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military. If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes. Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible. Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative. Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine. An addict never stops growing. Stupider. Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him. Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: "For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you". Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born.

You know a real friend?
Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone. The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do. Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit - not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal. A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering. Changes... can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it - it will reassemble in the same form.

The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body. Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation. The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues. The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility. This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.