This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive and feeling, as...

Somewhere I’d heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoid pleasure during the waning or absent moon out of respect for the...

I’m not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun… let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus… Aphrodite...

I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.

The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.

The birthing wolf,Her heart fed with tenderness,Gave forth from ripe brown nipples,Food to feed the universe.

Ô, wine!, the truth-serum so potent that all those who wish to live happy lives should abstain from drinking it entirely!… except of course when they are alone.

Who worries for dying? If I close my eyes tonight, I will either dream, or not, or my eyes will open and I will be here again. And if none of those happen, and I...

Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.

In my errant life I roamedTo learn the secrets of women and men,Of gods and dreams.I’ve known all the countries of our world,I’ve lived a thousand lives:Many lives I lived in love, Other lives I...

The poet believed that ‘Beauty’ first entered the world not at its creation, nor with the first garden, the first sunrise, the birth of the first man and woman and their first sexual act. The...

No man sings as beautifully as when his song is accompanied by a woman’s voice.

Wine gives one ‘ideas,’ whereas champagne gives one ‘strategies.

It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly...

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose...

I was forced to wander, having no one, forced by my nature to keep wandering because wandering was the only thing that I believed in, and the only thing that believed in me.

Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature.

I didn’t know then that young girls were a sort of poison, infectious to the man of age; and that men of age justly take woman of age to cure themselves of the diseases of...

I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old…drunk on wine and...

Not to waste the springI threw down everything,And ran into the open worldTo sing what I could sing…To dance what I could dance!And join with everyone!I wandered with a reckless heartbeneath the newborn sun.First stepping...

Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I...

From all that I saw,and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered.

I likened her to the slender PSYCHÉ and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: The dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened...

In Sanskrit, there exists no word for ‘The Individual’ (L’Individu). En Grèce antique, il n’y avait aucun mot pour dire ‘Devoir’ (Duty). In French, the word for ‘Wife’ is the same as the word for...

I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I’ve only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a “serious” novel.

The hour of spring was dark at last,sensuous memories of sunlight past,I stood alone in garden bowersand asked the value of my hours.Time was spent or time was tossed,Life was loved and life was lost.I...

Be there a picnic for the devil,an orgy for the satyr,and a wedding for the bride.

[As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.

She was a free bird: queen of the world and laughing.

Spanish rain,A maiden’s dress,Apothecary pillsAnd ancient thrills;Melancholy killsA girl’s caress.(—Roman Payne; Valencia, Spain, November 2nd 2012)

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I’ve no regrets.

My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, ‘You are a genius, my love!’ To which I replied, ‘My girl,’ whispering, ‘Every...

English:Ô, take this eager dance you fool, don’t brandish your stick at me. I have several reasons to travel on, on to the endless sea: I have lost my love. I’ve drunk my purse. My...

Sexual frenzy is our compensation for the tedious moments we must suffer in the passage of life. ‘Nothing in excess,’ professed the ancient Greeks. Why if I spend half the month in healthy scholarship and...

Favoring ‘resolution’ the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren’t satisfied unless at the end of the story...

She wakes in a puddle of sunlight.Her hands asleep beside her.Her hair draped on the lawnlike a mantle of cloth.I give her my trothfor our love is whole;her breath is my wine,her scent is my...

I’m a wanderessI’m a one night standDon’t belong to no cityDon’t belong to no man(Note: These lyrics were inspired by Roman Payne’s quote from his novel “The Wanderess”.)

I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall,...

Veimke” (jeune fille au pair),is subject to natural law,and can be made fat,by such things as poor diet,and alcohol.

My Love wakes in a puddle of sunlight.Her hands asleep beside her.Her hair draped on the lawnlike a mantle of cloth.I give her my lifefor our love is wholeI sing her beauty in my soul.

All that I desire in life are three…A wilderness: A beach on the sun-drenched sea,A puff of opium,And thee.

You are like a god, like an immortal one,’ she whispered to me one night in our bed, her naked body pressed to mine, our sweat golden and glistening in the candlelight. ‘Oh, my love,’...

I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. The disappearance of the presence...

Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will...

May a man live well-enough and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.

All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.

Without knowing why or how, I found myself in love with this strange Wanderess. Maybe I was just in love with the dream she was selling me: a life of destiny and fate; as my...

The moment her hymen was plucked from her body in the wilderness, Her soul was taken from sanity.

Let these men sing out their songs,they’ve been walking all day long,all their fortune’s spent and gone…silver dollar in the subway station;quarters for the papers for the jobs.

Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.