For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter.
This incompleteness is all we have.
When a writer is swayed with his fame and his fortune, you can float him down the river with the turds.
There would never be a way for me to live comfortably with people. Maybe I’d become a monk. I’d pretend to believe in God and live in a cubicle, play an organ and stay drunk on wine.
I would give anything for a female’s hand on me tonight. they soften a man and then leave him listening to the rain.
Basically, that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.
If I’m an ass, I should say so. If I don’t, somebody else will. If I say it first, that disarms them.
Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well.
Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops.
There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on.
The writing’s easy, it’s the living that is sometimes difficult.
There’s music in everything, even defeat.
Maybe when I get in the grave, things will be beautiful.
There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you.
Never trust a man in a jumpsuit.
The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go. but what they take is usually what they need least and what they let go is what they need most.
Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human – they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it’s good here, it can be very good here.
Love is a Dog from Hell.
Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.
I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a coffee cup in a park for old men playing chess or silly games of some sort.