I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said something against his mother.

Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.

Some's bastards, some's ain't. That's the score.

...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.

I have the right ideas, but my words are too... complicated. I need to simplify them, so that people won't get lost in the dark when they see and hear them. I want them to shine like beacons of light in a world of overly complicated darkness. One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away.

Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.