More Bukowski.

Excerpts from "Portions of a Wine-Stained Notebook."

• Why do you write?
  I write as a function. Without it I would fall ill and die. It's as much a part of one as the liver or intestine, and just about as glamorous.
  
  
• Does pain make a writer?
  Pain doesn't make anything, nor does poverty. The artist is there first. What becomes of him depends upon his luck. If his luck is good (worldly-speaking) he becomes a bad artist. If his luck is bad, he becomes a good one.
  
  
• all that I know is that I believe in the sound of music ... all else is squabble.
  
  
• perhaps the greatest achievement of Man is his ability to die, and his ability to disregard it. certainly poetry and paint are no deterrent, nor the high hurdles of the mind over the skulls of realism. let us say, finally, that truth is not all that matters -- often, it is the putting aside of a truth.
  
  
• a good man can climb any flag and salute prosperity (we're told) but how many good men can you get in an air-tight jar? and how many good poets can you find at IBM or snoring under the sheets of a fifty-dollar whore? more good men have died for poetry than all your crooked battlefields were worth; so if I fall drunk in a four-dollar room: you messed up your history -- let me dawdle in mine.
  
  
• When I have a poem accepted by a magazine that prints so-called quality poetry, I ask myself where I have failed. Poetry must continually move out of itself, away from shadows and reflections. The reason so much bad poetry is written is that it is written as poetry instead of concept. And the reason the public doesn't understand poetry is that there is nothing to understand, and the reason most poets write is that they think they understand. Nothing is to be understood or "regained." It is simply to be written. By someone. Sometime. And not too often.
  
  
• our Art is our agony turned to reason. We are the prize of a twisted mind, dirty bits of clay that sit and wait on some imbecile table in some imbecile darkness. our world turns on a violated wheel held up by the thin spokes of poetry...
  
  
• I don't force the hand to write the lie for the sake of creating another poem.
  
  
• death batters at my mind like a wild bat enclosed in my skull.
  
  
• Do you believe in the price of life? he asks. I don't quite understand your question. I do not believe in the price of anything. I am a dreamer. I believe in possession without pain. I am not a realist. I lack backbone, I hate boredom and striving. I'd rather listen to the overture to Samson by Handel.
  
  
• the dead are so very old and the
  living so very practical.
  bestial rhymes assault my heart, congregate there, stamp their flabby feet amongst the plague and wreckage.
  
  
• death, at last, is a bore -- no more than pulling a shade. we do not die all at once, generally, but piece by piece, little by little. the young die hardest and live hardest and understand nothing. but they are the most generous and the truest and better fit to lead than the cautious wise. who survives out of candor? show me those who are left and I will show you nothing. the young have yet to surrender to fact. and fact is nothing but the grime of centuries. the young bud is the hardest. I am old, so you cannot censure me with prejudice.
  
  
• Do you want an ending?
  write it yourself.
  

Anne Sexton

Admonitions to a Special Person
[Anne Sexton]

Watch out for power,
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.

Watch out for hate,
it can open its mouth and you'll fling yourself out
to eat off your leg, an instant leper.

Watch out for friends,
because when you betray them,
as you will,
they will bury their heads in the toilet
and flush themselves away.

Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.

Watch out for games, the actor's part,
the speech planned, known, given,
for they will give you away
and you will stand like a naked little boy,
pissing on your own child-bed.

Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes) ,
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won't be heard
and none of your running will end.

Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Special person,
if I were you I'd pay no attention
to admonitions from me,
made somewhat out of your words
and somewhat out of mine.
A collaboration.
I do not believe a word I have said,
except some, except I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you'll root
and the real green thing will come.

Let go. Let go.
Oh special person,
possible leaves,
this typewriter likes you on the way to them,
but wants to break crystal glasses
in celebration,
for you,
when the dark crust is thrown off
and you float all around
like a happened balloon.

Favorite quotes from Odd Thomas, part 1.

I'm currently in the middle of re-reading my favorite book -- Odd Thomas, by Dean Koontz. Here's the intro (wonderful, wonderful) and a few of the many highlighted quotes in my tattered copy.

"My name is Odd Thomas, though in this age when fame is the altar at which most people worship, I am not sure why you should care who I am or that I exist.

I am not a celebrity. I am not the child of a celebrity. I have never been married to, never been abused by, and never provided a kidney for a transplantation into any celebrity. Furthermore, I have no desire to be a celebrity.

In fact I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion.

I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I'm old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless."

"You can con God and get away with it if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next. He'll also cut you some slack if you're astonishingly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life."

"Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way."

"I prefer ghosts to be somber. There's something about a walking dead man trying to a get a laugh that chills me, perhaps because it suggests that even postmortem we have a pathetic need to be liked -- as well as the sad capacity to humiliate ourselves."

"Fire scares me, yes, and earthquakes, and venomous snakes. People scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable."

"From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity."