one can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid

I'll use the knives for spreading jam, and the gas to warm my greying love.

well, i don't know about you but I'm going to try everything! War, women, travel, marriage, children, the works. [...]. I want to know about things, what makes them work!

There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.

you've got to burn straight up and down and then maybe sidewise for a while and have your guts scrambled by a bully and the demonic ladies, you've got to run along the edge of madness teetering, you've got to starve like a winter alleycat, you've go to live with the imbecility of at least a dozen cities, then maybe maybe maybe you might know where you are for a tiny blinking moment.

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

young or old, good or bad, I don't think anything dies as slow and as hard as a writer.