I held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false.

It’s the order of things: each one gets a taste of honey then the knife.

I am for the small man who has not forgotten, for the man who loves his beer and his women and his sunlight

They, all of them, seemed to put literary form in front of the actuality and living of life itself.

We are hardly ever as strong as that which we create.

you've got to burn straight up and down and then maybe sidewise for a while and have your guts scrambled by a bully and the demonic ladies, you've got to run along the edge of madness teetering, you've got to starve like a winter alleycat, you've go to live with the imbecility of at least a dozen cities, then maybe maybe maybe you might know where you are for a tiny blinking moment.

Pretty words, as pretty women, wrinkle up and die.