I got tired and embarrassed by the constant poverty of those years. I told Doug [ Brinkley] this is really going to be a horrible downer of a book [The Proud Highway] if all it's going to be is about being broke. I didn't like being reminded of desperation at all times.

Just sick enough to be totally confident

Good peo­ple drink good beer. Just look around any pub­lic bar­room and you will see: Bad peo­ple drink bad beer. Think about it.

It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it.

As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing', I will be a writer.

It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.

Goddammit. Yeah, I have. First, there's a huge difference between being arrested and being guilty. Second, see, the law changes and I don't. How I stand vis-à-vis the law at any given moment depends on the law. The law can change from state to state, from nation to nation, from city to city. I guess I have to go by a higher law. How's that? Yeah, I consider myself a road man for the lords of karma.