I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.
Bullfighting can be an art Boxing can be an art Loving can be an art Opening a can of sardines can be an art.
There’s nothing else as pleasant as being unpleasant when there’s nothing else to do, and there’s usually nothing else to do.
Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.
One more drink and you’re dead. This is no way to talk to a suicide head.
As we go on with our lives we tend to forget that the jails and the hospitals and the madhouses and the graveyards are packed.
I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future.
I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have. Let’s drink more wine!
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.