The night kept coming on in and there was nothing I could do.

Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

I think a man can keep on drinking for centuries, he'll never die; especially wine or beer...I like drunkards, man, because drunkards, they come out of it, and they're sick and they spring back, they spring back and forth...If I hadn't been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.

Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.

It’s never quite right, all the things we are taught, all the loves we chase, all the deaths we die, all the lives we live.

There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything.

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left.