“If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.”

“I don't like any shows very much, if you want to know the truth. They're not as bad as movies, but they're certainly nothing to rave about. In the first place, I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do. Some of the good ones do, in a very slight way, but it's not in a way that's fun to watch. And if the actor's really good, you can always tell he knows he's good, and that spoils it. ”

“After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains.”

“If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean, you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings--excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men.”

“But you don't have to be a bad guy to depress somebody - you can be a good guy and do it.”

“I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains.”

“There's a marvelous peace in not publishing, there's a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don't publish, they don't know what you're doing. You can keep it for yourself.”