Banion wondered which was worse - being sodomized by aliens, or having to sit through two hours of Charles Ives.

There's music in everything, even defeat

I've learned to feel good when I feel good. it's better to be driven around in a red porsche than to own one. the luck of the fool is inviolate.

Sweet Christ, you must know that a man will go further for any poem than for any woman ever born.

If you can only remain pure in your stupidity, someday you may get a phone call from hell.

And yet women-good women--frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.

I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.