Wishin' was dyin' but I gotta make it all this way to that bed on these feet.

So if I were talking to a young writer, I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be.

I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

something has been said for sobriety but very little.

Wishin' was dyin' but I gotta make it all this way to that bed on these feet.