"[G]ood style is a matter of rendering out of oneself all the cupidities, all the cripplings, all the velleities.... I try to go over my work in every conceivable mood. I edit on a spectrum that runs from the high, clear manic impressions of a drunk, which has made one electrically alert, all the way down to the soberest reaches of depression where I can hardly bear my words. By the time I'm done with writing I care about, I usually have worked on it through the full gamut of my consciousness.... The moment you borrow other writers' styles of thought, you need craft to shore up the walls. But if what you write is a reflection of your own consciousness, then even journalism can become interesting."

"Booze, pot, too much sex, too much failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition, frustration. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice - as one becomes older, one becomes aware of one's cowardice; the desire to be bold which once was a joy gets heavy with caution and duty."

"[T]he audience which has no tradition by which to measure their experience but the intensity and clarity of their inner lives. That's the audience I'd like to be good enough to write for."

"[A friend of mine said he wrote because] 'The only time I know that something is true is at the moment I discover it in the act of writing.' I think [this is why one writes]. [You're] in love with the truth when you discover it at the point of a pencil. That, in and by itself, is one of the few rare pleasures in life."

"One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness - the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others."