“At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.”

“The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector’s item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.”

“The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith.”

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

“I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”

“I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.”

“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”