#Personal Experience Quotes

“I can find my biography in every fable that I read.”

“I reached Ghazipur three days ago. Here I am putting up in the house of Babu Satish Chandra Mukherji, a friend of my early age. The place is very pleasant. Close by flows the Ganga, but bathing there is troublesome, for there is no regular path, and it is hard work wading through sands.”

“The song 'Innocent' is a song that I wrote about something that really, really emotionally impacted me.”

“I have long given up the idea of a little house on the Ganges, as I have not the money.”

“My experience...convinced me that tea was better than brandy, and during the last six months in Afica I took no brandy, even when sick taking tea instead.”

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.”

“LSD...reinforc ed my sense of what was important-creat ing great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

“It was far too cold. The second I got out I had this incredible headache, I'm just not used to it. The last time I saw snow was years and years ago.”

“My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.”

“Why should I need an artist to explain a work of art to me? Why should it not speak out to me itself?”

“I believe that it would be almost impossible to find anywhere in America a black man who has lived further down in the mud of human society than I have; or a black man who has been any more ignorant than I have; or a black man who has suffered more anguish during his life than I have. But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.”

“What saved me then? Nothing but pregnancy. And each time after I had given birth to my work my life hung suspended by a thin thread.”

“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”

“I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.”

“Sex, drugs, and insanity have always worked for me, but I wouldn't recommend them for everyone.”

“To my surprise, my marijuana use has been tapering off steadily.”

“In terms of coke, the only money I ever thought about was that dollar bill I had stuck up my nose.”

“The ending of my experience with cocaine came in a periodic way. I would get high less frequently, I would use smaller amounts, and I would do coke for less periods of time. And that process just kept increasing and increasing until I wasn't using it at all. I didn't go on a program anywhere. I didn't join an organization or detox anywhere. I just slowly tapered off until it was gone. That was also true of my heavy pot use. I just tapered off until there was almost no use at all. And the same thing was true of drinking tons of beer.”

“Cocaine was different. It kept saying, "You haven't had enough." I became an abuser almost instantly.”

“I'd say pot has been a break-even proposition for me.”

“Sometimes, after I'd gone at the coke like one of those snow plows moving up First Avenue, I'd think my heart was over on the dresser, pounding, and I was watching it. I asked some of the doctors who drifted through the intensive-care unit what kind of effect total cocaine abuse has on the heart and they said things like, "Well, there's not enough valid information...." That kind of answer.”

“I was never a pipe or bong man. That's California stuff. I was an Eastern roller.”

“I went to George Washington High School for six months before my 16th birthday, when I could legally quit. That was an even worse experience than the Catholic schools. I mean, they were still teaching fractions. But mostly, I played hooky.”

“There are an awful lot of things in the cut of street drugs that eventually make you sick. I reached a point where the skin around the edges of my fingernails used to hurt all the time. And it would peel away easily. Now, that must have been from some poison in the cut.”

“Don't worry about this world; it is not broken. And don't worry about others. You worry more about them than they do. There are people waging war; there are people on the battlefield who are more alive than they've ever been before. Don't try to protect people from life; just let them have their experience while you focus upon your own experience.”

“If you answered, ''Spin the Bottle,'' then I frankly do not want to know any more about your childhood.”

“I know the struggles of poor people, and have always kept that with me.”

“I recently had my annual physical examination, which I get once every seven years, and when the nurse weighed me, I was shocked to discover how much stronger the Earth's gravitational pull has become since 1990.”

“I become faint and nauseous during even very minor medical procedures, such as making an appointment by phone.”

“Computers make me totally blank out.”

“The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn't even know what numbers were. Mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture to me. I was so intimidated by my incomprehension that I did not dare to ask any questions.”

“I can't even get a credit card without three credit bureaus saying I'm good enough.”