The only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted, I saw in a vision would be to just sit with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be “supervised.”
The Four Inevitabilities: 1. Musty Books. 2. Uninteresting Nature. 3. Dull Existence. 4. Blank Nirvana, buy that boy.
Accept loss forever. Be submissive to everything, open, listening. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and knowledge. Be in love with your life.
There is a blessedness surely to be believed, and that is that everything abides in eternal ecstasy, now and forever.
No matter how you travel, how ‘successful’ your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts.
You are the equal of the idol who has given you your inspiration.
And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born.
Whenever spring comes to New York I can’t stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I’ve got to go. So I went.
Eager for bread and love.
Writing at least is a silent meditation even though you’re going a hundred miles an hour.
You seek identity in the midst of indistinguishab le chaos, in sprawling nameless reality.
Oftentimes an originator of new language forms is called ‘pretentious’ by jealous talents. But it ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.
With joy realize for the first time thinking just not thinking-so I don’t have to think anymore.
The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then.
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.
Mainly I’ve been back to my books and writings and being nice and quiet and lazy. As I’m writing this, the radio says there’s a foot of snow falling on Long Island. I really love snow and wish I could take a long walk in it right now.
Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.
I am always thinking ‘What am I doing here? Is this the way I am supposed to feel?’
Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?
Hell man, I know very well you didn’t come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you’ve got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.