“You wake up in this here world, my sweet li'l mister, you got to wake up tough. You go out that front door tough of a mornin' and you stay tough 'til lights outhave you learned that?”

“The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you cant live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a day without starting to drift f...”

“I think all regions have had their peculiarities of speech rounded off by television, radio, and people travel so much more now.”

“I guess it's ridiculously romantic, but I wanted to be a full tilt, sink-or-swim writer.”

“When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly.”

“I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.”

“Nobody cares for getting belittled by a person youve had sex with. A person youve licked all over. Nobody wants to sit there and get run down too far by somebody who gives them a hard-on.”

“The greater self-confidence an individual possesses, the less inclined he is to put down others. This says a lot about those who constantly belittle.”

“Respect is the art of reciprocal. You can never earn respect by belittling and stepping over the people around you.”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous embarkation and heroic conquest, or...”

“He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.”

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”