Many seek and never see, anyone can tell them why. O they weep and O they cry and never take until they try unless they try it in their sleep and never some until they die. I ask many, they ask me. This is a great mystery.

It's very much related to the American tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That's exactly what it is.

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

We love to be hurt and we love to have our unhealing wounds opened and reopened again: we sit staring in the mirror of art, fascinated by our own deformities.

A naked lunch is natural to us We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness.

The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal... That was something I earned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing... The cure for that is to write the thing down which you will not publish and which you won't show people. To write secretly... so you can actually be free to say anything you want.

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night