I write as a function. Without it I would fall ill and die. It's as much a part of one as the liver or intestine, and just about as glamorous.

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

when I was a boy I used to dream of becoming the village idiot. I used to lie in bed and imagine myself the happy idiot able to get food easily ...and easy sympathy, a planned confusion of not too much love or effort. some would claim that I have succeeded.

In New York you've got to have all the luck.

It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that I am not allowed any.

I once lay in a white hospital for the dying and the dying self, where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die, where on my knees I prayed for LIGHT, I prayed for l*i*g*h*t, and praying crawled like a blind slug into the web where threads of wind stuck against my mind and I died of pity for Man, for myself, on a cross without nails, watching in fear as the pig belches in his sty, farts, blinks and eats.

If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket.