Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. Theyve been a laboratory for everybody.

See the moon? It hates us.

Write about what you're afraid of.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love...And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.

Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.