We are all exposed to the flash bulb of death.

You can't escape the past in Paris, and yet what's so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn't seem to burden.

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'