So what’s the use of repentance, and what do you care for goodness, and what if you should die in a quake, so who the hell cares? So I walked downtown, so these were the high buildings, so let the earthquake come, let it bury me and my sins, so who the hell cares? No good to God or man, die one way or another, a quake or a hanging, it didn’t matter why or when or how.

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When stuck, hit the road.

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You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.

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I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living

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Oh, God, help me! And I walked faster, my thoughts pursuing me, and I began to run, my frozen shoes squealing like mice, but running didn't help, the thoughts to the left and right and behind me. But as I ran, The Arm, that good left arm, took hold of the situation and spoke soothingly: ease up, Kid, it's loneliness, you're all alone in the world; your father, your mother, your faith, they can't help you, nobody helps anybody, you only help yourself, and that's why I'm here, because we are inseperable, and we'll take care of everything.

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I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed.

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Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit.

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Like my father, I am very impatient. I have a strong bullshit detector. I may finish one book in twenty that I have started.

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If there is work there is warmth, that when a man has freedom of movement it is enough, for then his blood is hot too

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One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Buker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.

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