Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

There's nothing else as pleasant as being unpleasant when there's nothing else to do, and there's usually nothing else to do.

Love is a horse with a broken leg trying to stand while 45,000 people watch.

First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L.A. Public Library.

I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.

I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a coffee cup in a park for old men playing chess or silly games of some sort.

To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.