Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.

Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.