“When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.”

We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we’re doing, if we’re selling it, if the listener likes us.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

An artist must believe in himself – Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence – but passionately.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing.

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life–live!”

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love.

Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.

Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.

Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light.

The human heart would never pass the drunk test…. If you took the human heart out of the human body and put a pair of legs on it and told it to walk a straight line, it couldn’t do it.