I like to see life with its teeth out.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

I must go down to the seas againto find where Iburied the hatchet with Yesterday.

They meant abnormal. Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one’s need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood.

All writers–all beings–are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force…All writers are exiles wherever they live and their...

Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

They think I’m going to be a schoolteacher but I’m going to be a poet.

…there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer’s own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day. . .

Timmy, who made a daring escape, also made a mistake of paying the taxi driver with a check made out of toilet paper.

It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we’re always...

I have always disliked the morning, it is too responsible a time, with the daylight demanding that it be ‘faced’ and (usually when I wake for I wake late) with the sun already up and...

Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the...

…we could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet’s guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of...

‘For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

I had a cousin once who lived in your dictionary, inside the binding, and there was a tiny hole which he used for a door, and it led out between trichotomy and trick. Now what...

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

People dread silence because it is transparent; like clear water, which reveals every obstacle—the used, the dead, the drowned, silence reveals the cast-off words and thoughts dropped in to obscure its clear stream. And when...

My memory of myself contains now myself looking outward and myself looking within from without, developing the view that others might have of me.

I don’t want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.

From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction...

They all seemed hungry, happy, and healthy enough in their buzzing—oh the days were hot, and the noise of bees filled the air that was dusty with pollen and sun haze, and there were tiny...

Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one’s need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood.

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets — dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.

It is my trade,” he said. “I work for the bean family, and every day there are deaths among the beans, mostly from thirst. They shrivel and die, they go blind in their one black...