You can steal my women but don’t play with my whiskey.
We are all museums of fear.
Banion wondered which was worse – being sodomized by aliens, or having to sit through two hours of Charles Ives.
Keep your money in your pocket. Or bet it on a good horse.
I have loved you woman as surely as I have named you rust and sand and nylon.
The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.
I suppose like others I have come through fire and sword, love gone wrong, head-on crashes, drunk at sea, and I have listened to the simple sound of water running in tubs and wished to drown.
I remember when each 4th lot was vacant and overgrown, and the landlord only go this rent when you had it, and each day was clear and good and each moment was full of promise.
A man who can beat the horses can do anything he makes up his mind to do.
Dying should come easy: like a freight train you don’t hear when your back is turned.
Courts are places where the ending is written first and all that precedes is simply vaudeville.
What a weary time those years were – to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.
There is nothing as boring as the truth.
We waste days like mad blackbirds and pray for alcoholic nightsour silk-sick human smiles wrap around us like somebody else’s confetti.
You have my soul and I have your money.
I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife inside because there was no alternative except to hide as long as possible – not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance: trying to connect.
I was their bar freak, they needed me to make themselves feel better. just like, at times, I needed that graveyard.
They, all of them, seemed to put literary form in front of the actuality and living of life itself.
The world had somehow gone too far, and spontaneous kindness could never be so easy.
It’s just that the grape has me down.