“It’s easy to write history. All the eyewitnesses are dead.”

“When it’s ‘Write Time’, it’s the right time!”

“Hard life… write more! Life sucks… write more! No matter what don’t stop. Keep to the grind and don’t let up. Somewhere out there is your ramp to success. Forget about the exits or the shortcuts along the way. Stay on the highway and when the ramp comes… take it and go!”

“We are the thoughts we choose to keep.”

“Let your words be your voice. And let your voice be heard within the hearts of others.”

“Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.”

“When a day goes by and I haven’t written anything, I better have been doing something worth writing about.”

“Every letterthat she types;every keystrokethat she strikes-To spell your nameagain and again,is all she everwants to write.”

“If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, “Nobody’s,” In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.”

“I never have time to write anymore. And when I do I only write about how I never have time. It’s work and it’s money and I’ve written more lists than songs lately. I stay up all night to do all these things I need to do, be all these things I want to be, playing with shadows in the darkness that shouldn’t be able to exist. Empty bottles and cigarettes while watching the sunrise, why do I complain? I have it all, everything I ever asked for.”

“When a poet settled down to write a poem, could he foresee the lines he would write? Did his head constantly spin with riddles and rhymes and was his only job to put them down? What if he couldn’t get them to make sense, and no one, not even the person he cared for most, could have pleasure in reading it? What would he do?”

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute.”