Controlled hysteria is what's required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It's agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.

Be liked and you will never want.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

A doctor could make a million dollars if he could figure out a way to bring a boy into the world without a trigger finger.

The writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always.

When a deposit bottle is broken, you don't get your nickel back.

The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.