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I really hate to write.
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My story is endless. I put in a teletype roll, you know, you know what they are, you have them in newspapers, and run it through there and fix the margins and just go, go - just go, go, go.
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My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
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I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove.
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Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.
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If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
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Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
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Accept loss forever.
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I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.
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My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet.
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My witness is the empty sky.
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All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
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All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
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It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
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Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
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All of life is a foreign country.
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You can't teach the old maestro a new tune.
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As you get older, you get more... genealogical.
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I'm really Wallace Beery in 'The Champ.'
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Symbolism is alright in 'fiction,' but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.
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I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
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At one point the driver said, 'For God's sakes, you're rocking the boat back there.' Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.
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Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple.
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All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.