“each man's hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behindmy ruined face.”

“Where did all the women come from? The supply was endless. Each one of them was individual, different. Their pussies were different, their kisses were different, their breasts were different, but no man could drink them all, there were too many of them, crossing their legs, driving men mad. What a feast!”

“There's nothing to stop a man from writing unless that manstops himself. If a man truly desires to write, then he will.Rejection and ridicule will only strengthen him. And the longerhe is held back the stronger he will become, like a mass of risingwater against a dam. There is no losing in writing, it will make your toes laughas you sleep, it will make you stride like a tiger, it will firethe eye and put you face to face with death. You will die a fighter, you will be honored in hell. The luck of the word. Go with it, send it.”

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? ”

“Someday,” I told Jan, “when they demonstrate that the world has four dimensions instead of just three, a man will be able to go for a walk and just disappear. No burial, no tears, no illusions, no heaven or hell. People will be sitting around and they’ll say, ‘What happened to George?’ And somebody will say, ‘Well, I don’t know. He said he was going out for a pack of cigarettes.”

“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.”