I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who’d kill anybody who said something against his mother.
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.
Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.
I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.
Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running – that’s the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach...
I was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.
I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing, and that until then I’ll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone’s lapel and make them confess to me and to all.
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.
Contrary to the general belief about photography, you don’t need bright sunlight: the best moodiest pictures are taken in the dim light of almost dusk, or of rainy days...
If you tell a true story, you can’t be wrong.
You’d be surprised how little I knew even up to yesterday.
Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank traced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.
Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...
It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.
Don’t tell them too much about your soul. They’re waiting for just that.
Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.