“I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive in its own terms.”

“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.”

“That moment - to this ...may be years in the way they measure,but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many dayswhen living stops and pulls up and sitsand waits like a train on the rails.I pass the hotel at 8and at 5; there are cats in the alleysand bottles and bums,and I look up at the window and think,I no longer know where you are,and I walk on and wonder wherethe living goeswhen it stops.”

“The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited.”

“in the cupboard sits my bottlelike a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers.I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony,sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere,the phone rings gamboling its soundagainst the odds of the crooked sea;I drink deeply and evenly now,I drink to paradiseand deathand the lie of love.”

“In my next life I want to be a cat. To sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. To sit around licking my ass.”

“My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.”