For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.
'Buncha Losers' comedy is one of those homegrown American art forms, up there with infomercials and Elvis-shaped soap carvings. No other civilization could have invented it. The French took a stab with Sartre's 'No Exit,' but then they had to ruin it...
New York is not the centre for American culture and art that it once was because of the forces of conservatism. Giuliani, capitalism - and then there was 9/11. I really believe that if I leave, it will suffer! Maybe that's why I love it here, because...
She listens to the delicate fluttering of sparrows' wings, tiny messengers. The sound reminds her of life - struggling, beating, rising, flying, and now dissolving into space.
Here at the edges, in the cracks and at the crossroads, stepping from shadow to shadow in the river of darkness that runs through the heart of Wink, he feels much more at home.
No one does. No one really knows how to be happy. You just get close, sometimes. That’s all I want – just to be close.
Because when you love something, you want to do it all the time, even if no one is paying you for it. At least that's how I felt about drawing.
Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.
What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.
Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.
…she was afraid of how he made her feel, because he made her feel way too much
I don't know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn't know then I can't put into words.
Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land's still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn't going anywhere. And neither am I.
Gods are great," said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. "But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return...
Always take all the time to reflect that circumstances permit, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking. (Andrew Jackson)
It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.
Dream Song: As my eyes Search the prairie, I feel the summer in the spring. Whenever I pause The noise Of the village.
Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.
I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never again. Never fucking again.
You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.
Acid gave me a clinical, unblinking look at madness, and I discovered I wasn't brave enough to be insane.
