There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.

I've eaten a bag of Green apples. Boarded the train, there's no getting off

It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.

Every day one has to earn the name of 'writer' over again, with much wrestling.

I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

we walk the plank with strangers.

I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.