"The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words make them seem smaller than they were when they were in your head. …"

"I think that we're all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better--and maybe not all that much better, after all."

"Get busy living or get busy dying."

"If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (but neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, …"

"I have the heart of a small boy—and I keep it in a jar on my desk."