"People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live a certain way, without being kicked around. 'Course, the more you live a certain way, the less it feel like freedom. Me, I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time."

"Grain of Sand would become the underground hit of 1965 and Robbie Clark the new James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one. But the movie disappointed her. The more they tried to make it youthful, the more the energies on screen seemed out of date. It wasn't the film they had dreamed, the film they had imagined and discussed. The film they each wanted to live."

"New York, August 7 of 1964. Congress grants President Johnson complete authority over the war while she studies painting at Cooper Union and he completes dubbing on his first major film. She tells him she's sure it will be a hit. And the cats across the roof, mad in love, scream into drainpipes. And it's I who am ready, ready to listen. Never tired, never sad, never guilty."

"It's a fierce sort of feeling, thinking something is expected of you but you don't know exactly what it is. Brings forth a weird kind of guilt."

"All they want from me is finger-pointin' songs. I only got ten fingers."

"I know I have a sickness festering somewhere. I don't mean like Woody Guthrie, wasting away in some hospital. I couldn't do that, decay like that. That's nature's will, and I'm against nature. I don't dig nature at all. The only truly natural things are dreams, which nature cannot touch with decay."

"Woody Guthrie was dead, Little Richard was becoming a preacher, so whether you're a folksinger or a Christian, rock 'n' roll was the devil. Me? I was in a ditch, up a cliff, out of step, ready to quit. I wrote the kind of stuff you write when you have no place to live and you're wrapped up in the fire pump. I nearly killed myself with pity and despair. And then I wrote it. It was like swimming in lava. Skipping, kicking, catching a nail with your foot. Seeing your victim hanging from a tree."

"Seven simple rules for life in hiding:"

"You know, it's nature's will. And I'm against nature. I don't dig nature at all."

"I accept chaos. I don't know whether it accepts me."

"Good and evil were invented by people trapped in scenes!"

"I don't need to look to someone else to tell me I'm good. Slaughter me for all I care; I refuse to be hurt."

"Everybody knows I'm not a folk singer."

"Yeah, it's chaos, it's clocks, it's watermelons, it's everything."

"God, I'm glad I'm not me."

"Yeah, I have none of those feelings."

"See, you just want me to say what you want me to say."

"How can I answer that if you got the nerve to ask me?"

"[Looking up at a giant Jesus on the cross] Do your early stuff!"

"[To a crucifix] How does it feel?"

"Harry Ditson - Maurice Becker"

"Jan Triska - Karl Radek"

"John J. Hooker - Senator Overman"

"Oleg Kerensky - Alexander Kerensky"

"Stuart Richman - Leon Trotsky"

"Roger Sloman - Vladimir Lenin"

"Dave King - Allan L. Benson"

"Nancy Duiguid - Jane Heap"

"Gene Hackman - Pete Van Wherry"

"Dolph Sweet - Big Bill Haywood"

"Kathryn Grody - Crystal Eastman"

"Leigh Curran - Ida Rauh"

"Interviewee: We all have problems, don't you know? But to take on the problem of all humanity, to save all humanity, my God, that was too big even for Jesus Christ."

"Interviewee: Kerensky was anxious to conduct it [World War I], produce some battalions of women who were going to go and fight."

"Interviewee: I said, I think, that a guy who's always interested in the condition of the world and changing it either has no problems of his own or refuses to face them."

"I think voting is the opium of the masses in this country. Every four years you deaden the pain."

"You dream that if you discuss the revolution with a man before you go to bed with him, it'll be missionary work rather than sex."

"I'd like to kill you, but I can't. So you can do whatever you want to. Except not see me."

"Jack dreams that he can hustle the American working man, who's one dream is that he could be rich enough not to work, into a revolution led by his party."

"If you were mine, I wouldn't share you with anybody or anything. It'd be just you and me. We'd be the center of it all. I know it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work."

"I'd like to see you with your pants off, Mr. Reed."

"Look, what does a capitalist do? Let me ask you that, Mike. Huh? Tell me. I mean, what does he make, besides money? I don't know what he makes. The workers do all the work, don't they? Well, what if they got organized?"

"Economic freedom for women means sexual freedom, and sexual freedom means birth control..."

"All right, Miss Bryant, do you want an interview? Write this down. Are you naïve enough to think containing German militarism has anything to do with this war? Don't you understand that England and France own the world economy and Germany just wants a piece of it? Keep writing, Miss Bryant. Miss Bryant, can't you grasp that J. P. Morgan has loaned England and France a billion dollars? And if Germany wins, he won't get it back! More coffee? America'd be entering the war to protect J. P. Morgan's money. If he loses, we'll have a depression. So the real question is, why do we have an economy where the poor have to pay so the rich won't lose money?"

"George Plimpton - Horace Whigham"

"Max Wright - Floyd Dell"

"Bessie Love - Mrs. Partlow"

"Ian Wolfe - Mr. Partlow"