Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness. . . .

I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

I give you soul. I give you wisdom and light and music and a bit of laughter. Also, I am the world's greatest horseplayer.

My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.

A dry period for me means perhaps going two or three nights without writing. I probably have dry periods but I'm not aware of them and I go on writing, only the writing probably isn't much good.

take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning