When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from "A" - particularly sections "22" and "23." It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

Dreaming men are haunted men.

Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost, Minute by minute, day by dragging day, In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways...

Remember that when you say "I will have non of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange," you have denied America with that word.

Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you might die of the truth.

Broad-streeted Richmond . . . The trees in the streets are old trees used to living with people, Family trees that remember your grandfather's name.

I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp, gaunt names that never get fat.

Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong. We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

You have the chief spark of your health's fire, for you have true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe.

Danni was his reward for all the bullshit he'd gone through, the torture, the anger, hatred and the bitter loneliness. She was going to be the band-aid for his torturedsoul.

No object, no event, no outcome or life circumstance can deliver real happiness to us. We have to make our own happiness—by working hard at activities that provide their own reward.15

If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.

Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

The love of her life dissolved into dreams.

Intelligence is like good taste. If you don't have it, you don't miss it.

I can't keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity.

I would like to play an average guy. I would have loved to play opposite John Candy in a movie. That was my dream for a long time, and sadly, now I can never realize that. But I'd like to do comedy.