At night I closed my eyes and saw my bones threading the mud of my grave.

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

The only people for me are the mad ones: the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who... burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles.

I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove.

...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.