Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers.

You can't miss what you never had.

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.

Allen [ Ginsberg] was a particular friend, one of my heroes, really. I knew him almost as long as I've been writing.

With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree.

North Vegas is where you go if you're a hooker turning forty and the syndicate men on the strip decide you're no longer much good for business out there with the high rollers.

There is a progression of understanding vis-a-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of distance -- physical, emotional, intellectual and every other way. Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people who own and control the game, because it is this finely managed distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off its ''national pastime'' pedestal in less than fifteen years.