“I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.”

When you make a bet, you’re saying something.

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets’ nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.

Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.

You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest; outside, the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business.

I’m good at reading people.

It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.

Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.

He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.

To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully.

It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.

Hold’em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.

Whatever obstacles you face, remember you can get through anything if you want to badly enough.

Doing anything when you’re bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored.

The things that stress me out haven’t changed. But I don’t wanna lose anything. So I thought that at least I would change. I’m lucky…that I’m afraid of losing something.

It took us five hours to reach Tokyo, but I was really happy. I kept talking about myself, and didn’t hear anything about Nana. But now that I know you better; I know you wouldn’t say anything.

As expected life isn’t that sweet at all. When I came to Tokyo I thought I could achieve anything with my own two hands. It’s not like that.

I had a feeling that my generation-and me, also-we were naked. We did not belong to anything.

Selling high or low doesn’t mean anything. It has to do purely with the market.

I never regret anything.