I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

I suspect that money is a far greater distraction for the artist than hunger.

You think of the book you'd most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.

Did you ever get fed up?' I said. 'I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?

How long should a man's legs be? Long enough to touch the ground.

It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques.