Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

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.'

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

The actual materials are important. A book at the nightstand is important - a light you can get at - or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern.

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

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!