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

The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.

in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.

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.

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.

Don’t do stuff that freaks him out, like what you’re doing now. Do something that makes him happy.

Something gets lost when you translate. It’s hard to keep straight. Perspective is every thing.

She was my sacred angel that I could never violate. Reira was my sanctuary. I needed something solid like that in this dirty, disappointing world.

Everybody kind of understands, Oh yeah you take drugs and it does something to your brain and then you can’t stop.

I don’t believe in asking people to spend $15 on something they’ve never heard before. That’s just unreasonable.

I like birthday cake. It’s so symbolic. It’s a tempting symbol to load with something more complicated than just ‘Happy birthday!’ because it’s this emblem of childhood and a happy day.

To give a price to an artwork, no matter how high or low, is always absurd. It’s not something that can be measured by money or by certain numbers.

When I made my Broadway debut, I was still cleaning houses, something I’d done since I went out on my own at 15.