The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.

For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

Death is woven in with the violets, ” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)

Freedom runs faster than a Samoan cop that’s been paid to run. Freedom always run faster.

Life is a stage: perform your masterpiece.

The first time I saw Cricket, I loved her. Little did I know that skinny, goofy girl would one day grow up to be a great dragon slayer. I would have pegged her for a shoemaker.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

We declare that love is the cause of the existence of all phenomena and that the absence of love is the cause of disintegration or non-existence.

The older I get, the more relaxed I am.

Except in these latter-day songs, [Bob] Dylan is a grizzled old prophet who's already been to hell and back.

I never got into things to be famous. Sometimes its fun, sometimes its annoying.

I enjoyed the courtroom as just another stage but not so amusing as Broadway.

Lasting joy is found not in what you get, but in what you give.