A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art.

She may be lying in bed reading a book, she may be making love with a prize fighter, or she may be running like mad through a field of stubble, one shoe one, one shoe off, a man named Corn Cob pursuing her hotly. Wherever she is I am standing in complete darkness; her absence blots me out.

My world of human beings had perished. I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort

Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.