It doesn’t pay to try

All the smart boys know why

That doesn’t mean I don’t try

I just never know why

– Johnny Thunders

I must have talked incessantly about myself, about how I really didn’t want to do anything, about how, even if I still wrote, and used to think of myself as a writer, I didn’t any longer, how I thought of myself as a man with nothing to do in the world ever, except to remain conscious, and that was what the writing was for, for my own use and the use of my friends.

– Alexander Trocchi

The way attacks on the consumer society become products to be consumed is, to put it delicately, discouraging.

– Pauline Kael

The novels do not imitate reality, they imitate writing.

– Charles Lyons

The aching beauty which harasses the artist can scarcely be said to derive from matter.

– Julian Jaynes

Whether it was by conscious decision or through a subconscious inclination, one senses that they both strove to evoke an awareness of both the ideal and the actual in their work, to convey what in philosophical terms might be expressed as a consciousness of the absolute inherent in and pervading the relative.

– Jerome Jordan Pollitt

Life is a phenomenal thing.

– Hector "Macho" Camacho

Love is for the Athenians an acceptance of beauty through every sense at man’s disposal.

– Rom Landau

Her two hand clung around my neck; had she been shipwrecked she would not have clung more desperately. And I did not know if she wished me to save her, or if she wished us to drown together.

– Raymond Radiguet

The harmonicas play

The skeleton key

And the rain

And these visions of Johanna

Are now all that remain

– Bob Dylan

I guess agriculture is better than no culture at all.

– Lou Holtz