I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.

Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.

Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.

The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.

Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

A man nearly always loves for other reasons than he thinks. A lover is apt to be as full of secrets from himself as is the object of his love from him.

Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It's just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different.

The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.

Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women's hair rhapsodically described, women's faces acclaimed in odelike language.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

You are my star and you have made me see, ” he tells her, “and I am the air beneath your wings, never rending, never ending.

The question for each man is not what he would do if he had the means time influence and educational advantages but what he will do with the things he has.

Sleep is still difficult I sleep for three or four hours a day. Usually sometime in the afternoon. I walk in the cold, keep myself numb. I cry less, and less." (James Frey, pg.88)

I'm not a quitter. I believe in following things through.

External circumstances will not change until internal belief systems change.

I don't like coffee but I need caffeine.

Courage is the willingness to speak the truth about what you see and to own what you say.

Anything unnatural was not naturally believed. Faith, in essence, was unnatural.