39 quotes
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead: men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideals.
All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was always controlling who got a chance and who didn’t.
Ham On Rye (1982)
Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.
Women (1978)
Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.
Women (1978)
But I couldn't help thinking, god, all these mailmen do is drop in letters and get laid. This is the job for me, oh yes yes yes.
When I went to the Yellow Cab Company I passed the Cancer Building and I remembered that there were worse things than looking for a job you didn't want.
Factotum (1975)
Something was always after a man. It never relented. No rest, ever.
Pulp (1994)
Money is like sex. It seems much more important when you don't have any...
Hollywood (1989)
LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.
If I'm an ass, I should say so. If I don't, somebody else will. If I say it first, that disarms them.
Interview with Robert Wennersten (1974)
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and eight times out of nine I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
Tales of ordinary madness (1967)
Sex was a trap, a snare. It was for animals.
Pulp (1994)
a woman can
drop
out of your
life and
forget you
real fast.
a woman
can't go anywhere
but UP
after
leaving you,
honey.
The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992)
I didn't even have a uniform, just a cap. I wore my regular clothes. The way my shackjob Betty and I drank there was hardly money for clothes.
"Fay had a spot of blood on the left side of her mouth and I took a wet cloth and wiped it off. Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love.”
How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
Factotum (1975)
"Someday," I told Jan, "when they demonstrate that the world has four dimensions instead of just three, a man will be able to go for a walk and just disappear. No burial, no tears, no illusions, no heaven or hell. People will be sitting around and they'll say, 'What happened to George?' And somebody will say, 'Well, I don't know. He said he was going out for a pack of cigarettes.
Factotum (1975)