I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.

You've got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.

The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble.

What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned.

Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don't like the wispy and the vague... or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I'm impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I've done have come to me by instinct.