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.

That’s when I first learned that it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.

It's not the large things that send a man to the madhouse... no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies... not the death of his love but the shoelace that snaps with no time left.

My body gnaws at me from one side and my spirit gnaws at me from the other.

I could never accept life as it was, I could never gobble down all its poisons bu there were parts, tenuous magic parts open for the asking.

I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do — mostly with my time.

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.