“she whispers into my truculenceand I succumb to that thing called faiththat blind old hag who left her brothers and sistersunder the overpassshe strokes her way into my soula divining rod slips from the heavensa greasy old senior citizenwith stale coffee breathand a proverb for any situationshe recounts the transgressions from a lifetime agowith a glassine visionthe images move in a circular sway,dashing from light to darktruisms to falsehoodsthis is a woman, my friend, with whom you can ride the riverand gaze at the mountainthis is a womanwith a heart fired by the very furnace of Hellyet beats with the sonnets of God”

“she said, when I wear these boots no one fucks with mewhen I tie my past like a scarf around my throatI can freeze the bloodof every naive and unabashed up-and-comerwhen I slide on my desire like glowing black stockingsI can make the uninitiated begfor the feel of raw and stinging woodand when I slip my angry black leather beltfrom its rusty hookthe ambitious and guileless cowerlike a thousand condemned soulswhen I close my fist, my rings goldenwith a youth well spentthe warriors of Gilead surrenderwith a breathless whimperand when my shouldersfeel the rough comfort of my serape woven with the fibersof a fierce and relentless vengeanceyou will soon realizethese are not my clothes after all, she says,they are warning signs”

“Aside from the possible scientific explanations for the death of ballsiness, there is an economic one, which I think may be the real cause: high rents. It's very hard to be a ballsy writer when you can't afford to live anywhere. It makes you absolutely nervous and insane and takes all yours guts away. I have to say this is the case for yours truly. If I could pay a 1954 rent of fifty-eight dollars a month, I might actually be a ballsy writer. But I'm so crippled by my enormous twenty-first century rent that I can barely get out of bed, let alone raise hell, which is what you need to do to qualify as a ballsy writer. You have to be a hell-raiser. You have to care about political things and you have to be able to afford booze, not to mention days lost to hangovers. But if you're worried all the time about having to go live with your parents as a thirty-seven-year-old, then to hell with hell. You only have one goal: to come up with the rent. You don't have time for political causes or all-night orgies.”

“I know I experience great consolation when my mouth is between a woman’s legs. I think it must be because I’m drinking in her happiness.”

“I wondered where the person was who had taken my place, who wanted to know what news people had been told. I'm always looking for the person who replaces me, who thinks the things I do, who fills in for me when I'm not there. I know there is someone younger than me doing what I did and someone older doing what I will do, and someone my age being just like me.”

“I shall possess this woman; I shall steal her from the husband who profanes her: I will even dare ravish her from the God whom she adores. What delight, to be in turns the object and the victor of her remorse! Far be it from me to destroy the prejudices which sway her mind! They will add to my happiness and my triumph. Let her believe in virtue, and sacrifice it to me; let the idea of falling terrify her, without preventing her fall; and may she, shaken by a thousand terrors, forget them, vanquish them only in my arms.”

“I live for coincidences. They briefly give to me the illusion or the hope that there's a pattern to my life, and if there's a pattern, then maybe I'm moving toward some kind of destiny where it's all explained.”