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When a man talks from the heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

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It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

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Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

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Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.

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The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

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It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

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You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

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So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

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The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in t...more

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Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

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You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your b...more

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Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.

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We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

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Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces togeth...more

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Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited o...more