Iceberg Slim Quotes

An emotional debt is hard to square.

Before I'd touch a square bitch's slit, I'd suck a thousand clappy pricks and swim through liquid shit, They got green puke between their rotten toes, And snot runs from their funky nose, I hope square bitches become syphilitic wrecks, I hope they fall through their own assholes and break their motherfucking necks.

My heart lost rhythm at the flicker of phantom in the whiskey-stained voice.

Why did Justice really always wear a blindfold? I knew now. It was because the cunning bitch had dollar signs for eyeballs

Son, there is no reason except a stupid one for anybody to project on that screen anything that will worry him or dull that vital edge. After all, we are the absolute bosses of that whole theatre and show in our minds. We even write the script. So always write positive, dynamic scripts and show only the best movies for you on that screen whether you are pimp or priest.

Only a fool trips on what is behind them.

I smelled the stink that only a street whore has after a long, busy night.

I’m bullshit proof.

No more small towns for me. I was going to the city to get my degree in pimping.

But, when I was growing up, the one thing that did help me not to feel so isolated and crazy was reading - especially books by authors who fearlessly examined and exposed their highly imperfect inner lives. Books like "Confessions of a Mask" by Yukio Mishima; "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller; "Try" by Dennis Cooper; and, of course, the works of authors like Bukowski, Salinger, Hesse, Bataille, Iceberg Slim, and Murakami. These writers revealed the things that existed beneath most humans' seemingly secure and confident exteriors. I suddenly realized, after reading their work, that I wasn't unique - that my doubts and fears and insecurities were more universal that I could've ever imagined. Their words gave me strength. They have me permission to start trying to accept my flaws, my darkness, my insanity. They let me know that it was okay not to fit in with everyone else - to be a sensitive person - and that others struggled just like I did. It was such a relief when I finally began to understand this. It was like I could breathe - maybe for the first time.

He was an old Drag man with his bit getting short. He was the first to attempt to teach me to control my emotions. He would say, “Always remember whether you be sucker or hustler in the world out there, you’ve got that vital edge if you can iron-clad your feelings. I picture the human mind as a movie screen. If you’re a dopey sucker, you’ll just sit and watch all kinds of mindwrecking, damn fool movies on that screen.” He said. “Son, there is no reason except a stupid one for anybody to project on that screen anything that will worry him or dull that vital edge. After all, we are the absolute bosses of that whole theatre and show in our minds. We even write the script. So always write positive, dynamic scripts and show only the best movies for you on that screen whether you are pimp or priest.” His rundown of his screen theory saved my sanity many years later. He was a twisted wise man and one day when he wasn’t looking, a movie flashed on the screen. The title was “Death For an Old Con.

He took the bait like a rapist in a nudist colony for the blind.

Whirly bits of confused thought stormed my mind.

It was a tragic Westside slum inhabited by poverty-mauled blacks.

This volume is dedicated to time. It gives us memories, fine wine, and wrinkles. But the only thing worse than getting old is not getting old. So here's to time, dear reader, yours and mine. May you have many more wrinkles, a lot of fine wine, and memories to last two lifetimes.

I want to say at the outset that I have become ill, insane, as an inmate of the torture chamber behind America's fake facade of justice and democracy. But I am not as ill as I was, and I am getting better all time.

Slim, I hope you ain't sexed that pretty bitch yet. Believe me, Slim, a pimp is really a whore who's reversed the game on whores. Slim, be as sweet as the scratch. Don't be no sweeter. Always stick a whore for a bundle before you sex her. A whore ain't nothing but a trick to a pimp. Don't let em Georgia you. Always get your money in front just like a whore. Whores in a stable are like working chumps in the white man's factory..

A bitch aint shit without a man's good whip, & 1 monkey wont stop my show.

The pimp game is like the watchmaker's art, it's tough. Party went through his life struggling to make a watch while wearing boxing gloves.

Junkie whores on both sides of Calumet clung to the fetid doorways and rotted stoops like painted lice to a filthy crotch.

croak us for free. He’d suck Nino’s ass with a straw.

He was just a Deep South chump driven to

I want to say at the outset that I have become ill, insane, as an inmate of the torture chamber behind America's fake facade of justice and democracy. But I am not as ill as I was, and I am getting better all the time. And also, I want to make clear that my reason for starting these notes at a point of personal anguish and suffering is that these experiences marked the end of a corrupt pimp life and were the prelude to a still mauled, but constructive new life.

All through high school, I was reading Iceberg Slim. He was the first author I discovered who truly delved

One of those arrogant repeaters went to the hole for having a sassy look in his eyes. The charge was ‛visual insubordination.

Iceberg Slim did for the pimp what Jean Genet did for the homosexual and thief and William Burroughs for the junky: articulate the thoughts and feelings of someone who had been there. The big difference is that they were white. Unlike them, and despite one Harvard study of Pimp as a ‘transgressive novel’, Slim was, and still is, marginalised as a writer. It’s ironic and indicative of the institutionalised racism of English-speaking society that someone whose influence on Western culture is now probably greater than any touted (white) writer of all postwar generations finds himself in this peculiar position. Literature, always the most culturally hegemonic art form, has basically shut Slim out, in a way the music industry tried (unsuccessfully) to do with black artists for years.

I was losing, page by page, the fine rules of thought and deed that I had learned in church, from Henry to the Boy Scout Troop in Rockford. I was sopping up the poison off the street like a sponge.

I had been bigger sucker than a square mark. All he loses is scratch. I had joined a club that suckered me behind bars fives times.

How about it, an Iceberg with a warm heart?

Few things worth doing can be done alone. To get past the conceptual stage, ideas need to become crusades; you’ve got to convince people to join you. I was lucky right off the bat to find Bill Gates, whose passion for business matched mine for tracking technology. Later I’d be fortunate to meet Bert Rutan en route to SpaceShipOne and to find Allan Jones to lead our brain work. I’ve also seen what can happen when the right team isn’t in place, how the best ideas can founder. I made more mistakes in pursuing the Wired World than I can count, but the first and worst was this: I often failed to find the right people to help me execute my vision. My own history probably swayed me to take a flier on some with slim track records and to entrust them with too much too soon. Since then I have learned to be more careful. Talent is indeed essential, but seasoning and maturity are not to be underestimated. Above all, I’ve learned the pitfalls of getting so locked in to looking ahead that you miss the pothole that makes you stumble, or the iceberg that sinks you. Still, any crusade requires optimism and the ambition to aim high. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to find my own challenges, see them through to fruition, and—if everything breaks right—change the world for the better.