“The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene”

“Every hero is the villain of his own story.”

“Every man is a hero in his own story, Princess.”

“Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.”

“He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.”

“A man must make himself a man, he must enable himself to stand up on two legs, unafraid because he has confidence in his own security and in his own power. There is no place for emotionally or politically cuckolded people in the society I speak of. Survival of the fittest.”

“An individual who has survived physical death can if he wishes recreate any portion of his own past as it was. He can recreate any portion of his own past in any way he wishes, changing his own actions within it if he so chooses, combining and reforming the entire composition. Such a procedure is usually a dead-end enterprise. The others involved are vivid hallucinations, and he may not realize this.”

“[The moral hero is] fighting for the reshaping of his own society on sounder lines [his] behavior might offend the sense of decorum of the cautious conventionalist.”

“There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions.”

“A young wolfhound must meet his first wolf someday, but if the wolf sees him as a puppy, if he acts the puppy, the wolf will surely kill him. The wolfhound must be a wolfhound in the wolf's eyes even more than in his own, if he is to survive.”