Pull a string, a puppet moves ... each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand - and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha ... can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know.

You can steal my women but don't play with my whiskey.

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

He asked, "what makes a man a writer?" "well," I said, "it's simple, it's either you get it down on paper or you jump off a bridge. writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers." "are you desperate?" "I don't know.

The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed and their mothers have never been told to shut up.

as the spirit wanes the form appears

Experience can dull. With most men experience is a series of mistakes; the more experience you have the less you know.