Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.