Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
the writing of some men is like a vast bridge that carries you over the many things that claw and tear. The Wine of Forever
Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well.
Potential," I said, "doesn't mean a thing. You've got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have.
A woman must be nursed into subsistence by love, where a man can become stronger by being hated." - from 'Cows in Art Class
I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.
The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed and their mothers have never been told to shut up.
my youth, one time, that time I knew even through the nothingness, it was a celebration of something not to do but only know.
There's nothing else as pleasant as being unpleasant when there's nothing else to do, and there's usually nothing else to do.
As we go on with our lives we tend to forget that the jails and the hospitals and the madhouses and the graveyards are packed.
And yet women-good women--frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.
So, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools. It was going to be easy for me.
I went to the bathroom and threw some water on my face, combed my hair. If I could only comb that face, I thought, but I can't.
Some lose all mind and become soul,insane. some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual. some lose both and become accepted
I can see where creation often stops while the body still lives and often does not care to. the death of life before life dies.
That’s when I first learned that it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.
Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.
When I get down to my last dime I'll just walk over to skid row." "There are some real weirdos down there." "They're everywhere.
it's good to have things done with when they don't work it's also good not to hate or even forget the person you've failed with.
Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.
Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.
and getting dressed we talk about what else there might be to do, but being together solves most of it, in fact, solves all of it
I am ashamed to be a member of the human race but I don't want to add any more to that shame, I want to scrape a little of it off.
Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity
Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.
I walk into the kitchen, look at the typer down there on the floor. It's a dirty floor. It's a dirty typer that types dirty stories
You can forgive a fool because he only runs in one direction and doesn't deceive anybody. It's the deceivers who make you feel bad.
to fight for each minute is to fight for what is possible within yourself, so that your life and your death will not be like theirs.
the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a coffee cup in a park for old men playing chess or silly games of some sort.
People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.
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
Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.
I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love, and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.
I think that the world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just cats and rain, rain and cats, very nice, good night.
nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.
Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.
We waste days like mad blackbirds and pray for alcoholic nightsour silk-sick human smiles wrap around us like somebody else's confetti
The centuries are sprinkled with rare magic with divine creatures who help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us
... to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o'clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you.
I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.
my 6 foot goddess makes me laugh the laughter of the mutilated who still need love... she has saved me from everything that is not here
The poet, as a rule, is a half-man - a sissy, not a real person, and he is in no shape to lead real men in matters of blood, or courage.
To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.
I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do — mostly with my time.
They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.
We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting
if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.
Sometimes a man doesn’t know what to do about things and sometimes it’s best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything.
Meanwhile the 3 a.m. drunks of the world would lay in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it.
It was only the matter of a new voice. Nobody listened to an old voice anymore. Old voices became a part of one's self, like a fingernail.