I write right off the typer. I call it my "machinegun." I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies.

Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human - they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here.

In New York you've got to have all the luck.

As we live we all get caught and torn by various traps. Nobody escapes them. Some even live with them. The idea is to realize that a trap is a trap. If you are in one and you don't realize it, then you're finished.

When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.

I have gotten so used to melancholia that I greet it like an old friend.

I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.