Why do you insist upon destroying yourself?

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start.

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.

Drinking is another way of thinking, another way of living. It gives you two lives instead of one.

The pest, in a sense, is a very superior being to us: he knows where to find us and how--usually in the bath or in sexual intercourse or asleep.

great books are the ones we need

The role of the poet is almost nothing...drearily nothing. And when he steps outside of his boots and tries to get tough as our dear Ezra [Pound] did, he will get his pink little ass slapped.