The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.