“each man must realizethat it can all disappear veryquickly:the cat, the woman, the job,the front tire,the bed, the walls, theroom; all our necessitiesincluding love,rest on foundations of sand —and any given cause,no matter how unrelated:the death of a boy in Hong Kongor a blizzard in Omaha . . .can serve as your undoing.all your chinaware crashing to thekitchen floor, your girl will enterand you'll be standing, drunk,in the center of it and she'll ask:my god, what's the matter?and you'll answer: I don't know,I don't know . . .— PULL A STRING, A PUPPET MOVES . . .”

“Your parents don't give you much love, do they?''I don't need that stuff,' I told her.'Henry, everybody needs love.''I don't need anything.''You poor boy.”

“You just rebel against everything. How are you going to survive?I don't know. I'm already tired.”

“Lydia came back to bed. We didn't kiss each other. We weren't going to have sex. I felt weary. I listened to the crickets. I don't know how much time went by. I was almost asleep, not quite, when Lydia suddenly sat straight up in bed. And she screamed. It was a loud scream. "What is it?" I asked. "Be quiet." I waited. Lydia sat there without moving, for what seemed to be about ten minutes. Then she fell back on her pillow. "I saw God," she said, "I just saw God." "Listen, you bitch, you are going to drive me crazy!”

“Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.”

“Christmas poem to a man in jailhello Bill Abbott:I appreciate your passing around my books injail there, my poems and stories.if I can lighten the load for some of those guys withmy books, fine.but literature, you know, is difficult for theaverage man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too);I don't like most poetry, for example,so I write mine the way I like to read it.”

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”