I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.

The hangover was brutal but he didn't mind. It told him he had been somewhere else, someplace good.

Without literature, life is hell.

My flesh looked like it wasn't trying. It looked like it hated being part of me.

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.

I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.

...in that drunken place you would like to hand your heart to her and say touch it but then give it back.