"I ve given you my time. Its all I ve got to give - its all any man has. And for a pitiful buck and a quarter an hour."

"There is nothing worse than being broke and having your woman leave you. Nothing to drink, no job,just the walls, sitting there staring at the walls and thinking. That's how women got back at you, but it hurt and weakened them too. Or so I like to believe."

"There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity."

"There's no clarity.there was never meant to be clarity."

"Sometimes all we need to be able to continue aloneare the deadrattling the wallsthat close us in."

"By the way . . . I realize I switch from present to past tense, and if you don't like it . . . ram a nipple up your scrotum. -printer: leave this in."

"I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of."

"The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page."

"You boys can keep your virgins give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old."

"The gods play nofavorites."

"I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people."

"The total ugliness and indifference of the worst features of the human race come out in their driving habits."

"Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There's nothing to get excited about. They just know. They're saviours."

"I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them."

"It is so dark now with the sadness ofpeoplethey were tricked, they were taught to expect theultimate when nothing ispromisednow young girls weep alone in small roomsold men angrily swing their canes atvisions asladies comb their hair asants search for survivalhistory surrounds usand our livesslink awayinshame."

"Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped. Then there was a short period when you weren't with anybody, then another woman arrived, and you ate with her and fucked her, and it all seemed so normal, as if you had been waiting just for her and she had been waiting for you. I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right."

"My gardenin the sun and in the rainand in the day and in the nightpain is a flowerpain is flowersblooming all the time."

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."

"But then if you lied to a man about his talent just because he was sitting across from you, that was the most unforgivable lie of them all, because that was telling him to go on, to continue which was the worst way for a man without real talent to waste his life, finally. But many people did just that, friends and relatives mostly."

"You're the most unknown famous man I ever met."

"Don't be like so many writers,don't be like so many thousands ofpeople who call themselves writers,don't be dull and boring andpretentious, don't be consumed with self-love.the libraries of the world haveyawned themselves tosleepover your kind.don't add to that.don't do it."

"I like to prowl ordinary placesand taste the people-from a distance."

"There's a light somewhere.It may not be much light butit beats the darkness."

"Find what you love and let it kill you."

"Whether I was a genius or not did not so much concern me as the fact that I simply did not want a part of anything. The animal-drive and energy of my fellow man amazed me: that a man could change tires all day long or drive an ice cream truck or run for Congress or cut into a man's guts in surgery or murder, this was all beyond me. I did not want to begin. I still don't. Any day I that I could cheat away from this system of living seemed a good victory for me."

"Alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul,and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds.flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh.there's no chance at all:we are all trapped by a singular fate.nobody ever finds the one.the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the mad houses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills."

"If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence."

"Sometimes it's hard to knowwhat todo."

"I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely."

"When women agree with me I always do the other thing."

"We've all heard that little woman who says, "Oh, it's terrible what these young people do to themselves, in my lsi other drugs, is a terrible thing.Then you look, the woman who speaks in this way: you have no eyes, no teeth, no brains, no soul, no ass, no mouth, no warmth, no spirit, nothing, just a stick and avran made, you wonder how to reduce it in that state teas and pastries and the church."

"A good writer knew when not to write. Anybody could type. Not that I was a good typist also I couldn't spell and I didn't know grammar. But I knew when not to write. It was like fucking. You had to rest the godhead now and then."

"Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing."

"Sleeping in the rain helps me forget things like I am going todie and you are going to die and the cats are going to diebut it's still good to stretch out and know you have arms andfeet and a head, hands, all the parts, even eyes to closeoncemore, it really helps to know these things, to know youradvantagesand your limitations, but why do the cats have to die, Ithink that theworld should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, justcats andrain, rain and cats, very nice, goodnight."

"Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now."

"Wesat theresmokingcigarettesat5in the morning."

"Meanwhile the 3 a.m. drunks of the world would lay in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it."

"Don't you go to the movies?""Mostly just to eat popcorn in the dark."

"Having nothing to struggleagainstthey have nothing to strugglefor."

"When I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity ofmy city and it's ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked theheartaway."

"I didn't like anything. Maybe I was afraid. That was it - I was afraid. I wanted to sit alone in a room with the shades down. I feasted upon that. I was a crank. I was a lunatic."

"I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn't fit the other. I didn't care."

"Belane, are you nuts?"Who knows? Insanity is comparative. Who sets the norm?"

"How are his poems?""He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way."

"I see a brightportionunder the overhead lightthat shades intodarknessand then into darkerdarknessand I can't see beyond that."

"There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless."

"I write fiction""What's fiction?""Fiction is an improvement on life."

"My 6 foot goddessmakes me laughthe laughter of the mutilatedwho still needlove...she has saved mefrom everything that isnot here."

"Life's as kind as you let it be."

"She would have been a better fuck in Greece, maybe. America was a shitty place to fuck."