I've got the sad sads all I want to do is fuck you.
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.
Somebody was always controlling who got a chance and who didn't.
It seemed better to delay thinking.
I was born to hustle roses down the avenue of the dead.
You understand, we just don't fuck with truth.
I had come to the racetrack after the other two funerals and had won. There was something about funerals. It made you see things better. A funeral a day and I'd be rich.
It didn't pay to trust another human being. Humans didn't have it, whatever it took.
Living was easy - all you had to do was let go. And have a little money. Let the other men fight the wars, let the other men go to jail.
He, and all of us, are the victims of an attitude that has been growing in our land for nearly a decade - an attitude that says a man can choose the laws he must obey, that he can take the law into his own hands for a cause, that crime does not necessarily mean punishment.
Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
Oh, you've got a sweet voice, baby, such a sad sad sweet voice, I'd like to fuck you, I thought.
I know it's impossible to explain this to you. I carry this terrible aching hell in my heart.
Learn that there will be hours, days and months ahead of feeling absolutely terrible and nothing can change that; neither new girlfriends, health professionals, changes of diet, dope, humility, or God.
I was in love again. I was in trouble.
I hope that I never become a vogue. A vogue is damned and doomed forever.
Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that's all there is to it.
The lines on the page were pulled tight, like a man screaming, but not Joe, where are you? More like.
I will always carry you, inside, outside, on my fingertips, and at brain edges.
When Ginsburg is at the top of his game you might as well put down your toys and listen.
I got his ashes, she said, and I took them out to sea and I scattered his ashes and they didn't even look like ashes and the urn was weighted with green and blue pebbles...
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.
Still, I'm lucky: I feast on solitude, I will never miss the crowd. I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me. I sit in bed and wait for the whole thing to go one way or the other. just like everybody else.
I had this place in back, even had my own garden, planted all kinds of tulips, which grew, beautifully and amazingly. I had the green hand. I had the green money. what system I had devised I can no longer remember, but it was working and I wasn't and that's a pleasant enough way to live.
The cat is the beautiful devil.
There still might be a place for us somewhere.
Pretty words, as pretty women, wrinkle up and die.
The parents of rich kids tended to be more patriotic because they had more to lose if the country went under.
No pain means the end of feeling; each of our joys is a bargain with the devil.
Humanity, you never had it to begin with.
My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
She could talk. If she was a sphinx she could have talked, if she was a stone she could have talked. I wondered when she'd get tired and leave. Even after I stopped listening it was like being battered with tiny pingpong balls.
Her violence frightened me. She always claimed that I was the jealous one, and I was often jealous, but when I saw things working against me I simply became disgusted and withdrew. Lydia was different. She reacted. She was the Head Cheerleader at the Game of Violence.
Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.
When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.
When someone else's truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that's great.
The bums were better dressed, younger, but just as listless. They sat around on the window ledges, hunched forward, getting warm in the sun and drinking the free coffee that W.F.I. offered. There was no cream and sugar, but it was free.
Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.
I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.
Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work.
Do not ignore it. Fuck it. Cry your heart out. Then fuck it some more.
She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn't have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.
I always started a job with the feeling that I'd soon quit or be fired, and this gave ma a relaxex manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.
The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun.
And underneath all that, the fish, the poor fish fighting each other, eating each other. We're like those fish, only we're up here. One bad move and you're finished.
I knew it would be you.
Youth, you son of a bitch, where did you go?
Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.
I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.
