“A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….”

It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid.

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

Who gathers the withered rose?

I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it.

Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.

Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut.

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green…

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.

Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.

I’m learning without having to be behind a desk, so it’s a pretty cool place to be.

This famous quote hangs over my desk, as well as the desks of many people with the hubris and optimism to believe they can change the world for the better.

Young Baby Boomers were forced to play duck-and-cover in school, in hopes that a desk would protect them from an atomic explosion. It was all bullshit, and they knew it.

It is hard, it lasts all day, the lighting is generally fluorescent, and, apparently, drinking at your desk is frowned upon.

And then when we moved, I reconfigured my writing desk. The previous one had had very little space to write by hand. And suddenly, the poetry was gushing!

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.