Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.

I don't carry notebooks and I don't consciously store ideas. I try not to think that I am a writer and I am pretty good at doing that. I don't like writers, but then I don't like insurance salesmen either.

I can't think of any poet-recluses outside of one dead Jeffers. [Robinson Jeffers] The rest of them want to slobber over each other and hug each other. It appears to me that I am the last of the poet-recluses.

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

To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.

That's your response to everything: drink?" "No, that's my response to nothing.

there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it's too late and there's nothing worse than too late