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.

LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.

2 p.m. beer nothing matters but flopping on a mattress with cheap dreams and a beer as the leaves die and the horses die and the landladies stare in the halls; brisk the music of pulled shades, a last man's cave in an eternity of swarm and explosion; nothing but the dripping sink, the empty bottle, euphoria, youth fenced in, stabbed and shaven, taught words propped up to die.

great books are the ones we need

It’s when you hide things that you choke on them.

The hangover was brutal but he didn't mind. It told him he had been somewhere else, someplace good.

I wanted the whole world or nothing.