my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: Henry, smile!
why don't you ever smile?

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw

Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.

And if there is anybody out there who is crazy enough to want to become a writer, I'd say go ahead, spit in the eye of the sun, hit those keys, it's the best madness going, the centuries need help, the species cry for light and gamble and laughter. Give it to them. There are enough words for all of us.

In a more universal sense, we only get one thing. You know...a head stone if we're lucky; if not, green grass.

And then there are some who believe that old relationships can be revived and made new again. but please if you feel that way don't phone don't write don't arrive.

I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.

There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death.

I wasn't lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.

LSD, yeah, the big parade -- everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.

Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateurs drunks, the bores.

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.

The whole world is caught in her glance and at last the universe is magnificent.

It's all overrated, man. Sex is only a great thing if you're not getting any.

It was sad, it was sad, it was sad. When Betty came back we didn't sing or laugh, or even argue. We sat drinking in the dark, smoking cigarettes, and when we went to sleep, I didn't put my feet on her body or she on mine like we used to. We slept without touching. We had both been robbed.

Places to hunt places to hide are getting harder to find, and pet canaries and goldfish too, did you notice that?

But isn't there always one good thing to look back on? think of how many cups of coffee we drank together.

People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws.

Yes, Wagner and the storm intermix with the wine as nights like this run up my wrists and up into my head and back down into the gut.

The dog approached again, cautiously. I found the bologna sandwich, ripped off a chunk, wiped the cheap watery mustard off, then placed it on the sidewalk. The dog walked up to the bit of sandwich, put his nose to it, sniffed, then turned and walked off. This time he didn't look back. He accelerated down the street. No wonder I had been depressed all my life. I wasn't getting proper nourishment.

It's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?