I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.

People always clap for the wrong reasons.

I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.

They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good, that way.

Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.

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.

If Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly.