If you are terribly truthful, the ground will always move from under you, and you will have to shift with the constantly shifting truth.

The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.

To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry.

I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people’s lips in the face of great catastrophes which are beyond their grasp, the smile that comes at times on certain women’s faces while they are saying they regret the harm they have done. It is the smile of nature quietly and proudly asserting its natural right to kill.

We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds.

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

If you are terribly truthful, the ground will always move from under you, and you will have to shift with the constantly shifting truth.