“Some people have written that my writing has helped them go on.It has helped me too. The writing, the roses, the 9 cats.”

“Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness. . . .”

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

“Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.”

“There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.”

“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”

“Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.”