I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.
I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.
Love and despair go hand in hand.
A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.
I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.
The wild stuff is all so overrated. Drinking, you don’t feel good all the time. There’s a lot of down, a lot of misery.
The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer’s drug, but I’m glad that’s been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work.
The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think better. You’re braver, and you’ll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it’d be beautiful. The trouble was I couldn’t.
I hate to be fatalistic about it, but alcoholism, it’s just in your genes. We had some of it in my family, and it just got me.
I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they’re not. They’re not out there waiting. They’re not gonna use their intelligence on your book.
My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every shadow.
I think women are closer to God than we are. They walk right out there like they know what they’re doing.
Memory, the whole lying opera of it, is killing me now.
She had shared his sheets, and, in nightmares of remorse, he had shared her body, waking with drastic regret, feeling as soiled and soilsome as the city itself.
Memory, the whole lying opera of it.
When you read and wonder, for six seconds, about the random pointless violence of these days, then are blissful it was not you, having, really, a better day, stop and think: Could not these felons be, really, God’s children loose, adept, so hungry and correct in our world?
It came to him, the very picture: he was unshucked oyster, hurtling on the winds, all air, gonad and gut. Chances seemed in a loud hurry around him, but he could do nothing – nothing – about them. Mestre yearned to be driven by some grand circumstance. Everything in his existence was too slack.
What he was was pretty near invisible, except for the bell of his horn, the all-but-closed eyes, the Arabian nose, the brown hair with its halo of white ends, the desperate oralness, the giant reed punched into his face, and hazy Quadberry, loving the wound in a private dignified ecstasy.
In Mississippi it is difficult to achieve a vista.
He sifted into Elaine’s, drunk, Southern and insulting, but was ignored.
Marriage was a good cause, thought Ross. On a given day chances were one of you might be human.