Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground.
Creepy as hell. You ever see that TV movie about the clown in the sewer?
Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.
Come to a book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it, and draw your own map.... A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it.
By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.
But hardly anybody ever finds out that their actions really, actually, hurt other people! People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flie...
Another part of getting older: you forgot what you wanted to remember, and remembered what you wanted to forget.
A friend came to visit James Joyce one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair.James, what’s wrong?' the friend asked. 'Is it the work?'Joyce indicat...
There is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love.
Once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual
Your hair is winter fireJanuary embersMy heart burns there, too.
You don't have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.
You can't be careful on a skateboard.
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.
When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you...
When you want to feel better, call something a piece of shit. It usually works.
When you own a piano, it's harder to think about moving.
When all else fails, give up and go to the library.
What can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.
Thomas Ross appears to have been something of a rarity: a socially conscious young man.