A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.

Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico

Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.

Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.