In a more universal sense, we only get one thing. You know...a head stone if we're lucky; if not, green grass.

Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.

My part of the game is that I must live the best I can.

Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness. . . .

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

We use such big words to move nowhere.

it is all ash and dry leaves and grief gone like an ocean liner.