In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.

I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.

The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.

Divorce transforms habit into drama.

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

Hold'em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.