I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.

Four days alone with nothing. Emerge empowered. The first human face you see will knock you back 50%.

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

Thanksgiving. It proved you had survived another year with its wars, inflation, unemployment, smog, presidents. It was a grand neurotic gathering of clans: loud drunks, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, screaming children, would-be suicides. And don't forget indigestion. I wasn't different from anyone else: There sat the 18-pound bird on my sink, dead, plucked, totally disemboweled. Iris would roast it for me.

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

To create art means to be crazy alone forever.

As we go on with our lives we tend to forget that the jails and the hospitals and the madhouses and the graveyards are packed.