"Poetry is what happens when nothing else can."

"Of course it's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well."

"I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love."

"Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing."

"People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love."

"Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink."

"I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare."

"There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock"

"Baby," I said, "I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me."

"You boys can keep your virgins give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old."

"There is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy"

"The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable."

"Life's as kind as you let it be."

"My beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world."

"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"

"You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics."

"What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability."

"I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again."

"She was consumed by 3 simple things: drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more: youth and beauty"

"I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people."

"Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are."

"Without literature, life is hell."

"...in that drunken place you would like to hand your heart to her and say touch it but then give it back."

"Lighting new cigarettes, pouring more drinks. It has been a beautiful fight. Still is."

"We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain."

"Great art is horseshit, buy tacos."

"Dogs and angels are not very far apart"

"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."

"There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you."

"It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it."

"The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting"

"I never met another man I'd rather be. And even if that's a delusion, it's a lucky one."

"I drive around the streets an inch away from weeping, ashamed of my sentimentality and possible love."

"Some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about."

"And yet women-good women--frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep."

"I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready."

"I'm going, she said. I love you but you're crazy, you're doomed."

"I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go."

"Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss."

"You son of a bitch, she said, I am trying to build a meaningful relationship. you can't build it with a hammer, he said."

"Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so."

"Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness."

"It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the "real" meaning of the sun"

"Each man's hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face."

"She is no longer the beautiful woman she was. she sends photos of herself sitting upon a rock by the ocean alone and damned. I could have had her once. I wonder if she thinks I could have saved her?"

"The trouble with a mask is it never changes"

"In the morning it was morning and I was still alive."

"If you get married they think you're finished and if you are without a woman they think you're incomplete."

"We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

"The fuckers. There, I feel better. God-damned human race. There, I feel better."