“It’s not art for art’s sake, it’s art for my sake.”

I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us.

A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board

But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Only youth has a taste of immortality.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.

Perhaps only those people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the world.

Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born.

We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving.

All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis.

Eyes water, throat burns. Sins splattered like modern art; My ritual purge.

In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful, white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line, but I can’t seem to get there now. I can’t seem to get over that line.

No person learned the art of archery from me, who did not in the end make me his target.

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of art for art’s sake than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore – and then there will be time enough for art.

Turn your scars into stars.

But I am just a poet who makes art out of broken people.