When you clean up a city, you destroy it.
Life’s as kind as you let it be.
We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.
Without literature, life is hell.
There is a place in the heart that will never be filled; a space. And even during the best moments, and the greatest times, we will know it.
I want to let her know though that all the nights sleeping beside her even the useless arguments were things ever splendid and the hard words I ever feared to say can now be said: I love you.
Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I’ve had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I’m not writing than when I am.
I guess for me Hemingway is a lot like it is for others: he goes down well when we are young.
Hemingway and Saroyan had the line, the magic of it. The problem was that Hemingway didn’t know how to laugh and Saroyan was filled with sugar.
I seldom know what I’m going to write when I sit down. There isn’t much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing’s easy, it’s the living that is sometimes difficult.
A dry period for me means perhaps going two or three nights without writing. I probably have dry periods but I’m not aware of them and I go on writing, only the writing probably isn’t much good.
I write right off the typer. I call it my “machinegun.” I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies.
There seems no way out. I thought, everybody is always angry about the truth even though they claim to believe in it.
Nobody wins, ask Caesar.
Democracy doesn’t work, Christianity doesn’t work, nor Atheism, Nothing works but the gun and the man on top.
I felt that even the sun belonged to my father, that I had no right to it because it was shining upon my father’s house. I was like his roses, something that belonged to him and not to me.
Don’t let anybody tell you different. Life begins at 65.
Once she had been a little girl, someday she would be dead, but now she was showing me her upper legs.
I don’t think I was insane but many of the insane think that but i think now if anything saved me it was the avoidance of the crowd.
Some people don’t like anybody who is famous. Some people don’t like anybody who isn’t.
What foolishness makes us tweak the nose of Death continually?