He asked, "what makes a man a writer?" "well," I said, "it's simple, it's either you get it down on paper or you jump off a bridge. writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers." "are you desperate?" "I don't know.

Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.

What were you going to do tonight?" "I was going to listen to the songs of Rachmaninoff." "Who's that?" "A dead Russian.

We are here to laugh at the odds.

I think I need a drink.' 'Almost everybody does only they don't know it.

the way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart

I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.