we only asked for leopards to guard our thinning dreams.

I am a poem. There is no way out.

I can see where creation often stops while the body still lives and often does not care to. the death of life before life dies.

You have to lay down in the center of the action lay down and wait until it charges then you must get up face it get it before it gets you the whole process is more shy than vulnerable so lay down and wait sometimes it's ten minutes sometimes it's years sometimes it never arrives but you can't rush it push it there's no way to cheat or get a jump on it you have to lay down lay down and wait like an animal .

from the beginning, through the middle years and up to the end: too bad, too bad, too bad.

since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light

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.