She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn’t have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.
I met a genius on the train today about 6 years old, he sat beside me and as the train ran down along the coast we came to the ocean and then he looked at me and said, it’s not pretty.
Angels, we have grown apart.
There is no hurry. Time means nothing to you.
I’ll use the knives for spreading jam, and the gas to warm my greying love.
Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.
Love is a horse with a broken leg trying to stand while 45,000 people watch.
And yet women-good women – frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.
I write as a function. Without it I would fall ill and die. It’s as much a part of one as the liver or intestine, and just about as glamorous.
I’m only interested in poetry.
Experience can dull. With most men experience is a series of mistakes; the more experience you have the less you know.
But my whole life has been a matter of fighting for one simple hour to do what I want to do. There was always something getting in the way of my getting to myself.
I feel strangely normal.
Most people are not ready for death, theirs or anybody elses.
There’s nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death.
I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.
It was better for me when I could imagine greatness in others, even if it wasn’t always there.
I am this fiery snail crawling home.
Some people have written that my writing has helped them go on. It has helped me too. The writing, the roses, the 9 cats.
I don’t carry notebooks and I don’t consciously store ideas. I try not to think that I am a writer and I am pretty good at doing that. I don’t like writers, but then I don’t like insurance salesmen either.