she’s young, she said, but look at me, I have pretty ankl… and look at my wrists, I have pret… wrists my god,

I saw a vacancy sign in the window in front of a rooming-house, had the cabby pull up. I paid him and walked up on the front porch, rang the bell. I had one black eye from the fight, an...

having the low down blues and goin… into a restraunt to eat. you sit at a table. the waitress smiles at you. she’s dumpy. her ass is too big.

crud, he said, hauling it out of the water, what is it? a Hollow-Back June Whale, I said… no, said a guy standing by us on t…

of course, I may die in the next t… and I’m ready for that but what I’m really worried about… that my editor—publisher might ret… even though he is ten years younge…

terror finally becomes almost bearable but never quite terror creeps like a cat crawls like a cat

I only met one student at City College that I liked, Robert Becker. He wanted to be a writer. “I’m going to learn everything there is to learn about writing. It will be like taking a ca...

I found a room on Temple Street in the Filipino district. It was $3.50 a week, upstairs on the second floor. I paid the landlady—a middle-aged blond—a week’s rent. The toilet and tub we...

believe in earning one’s own way but I also believe in the unexpect… gift and it is a wondrous thing when a woman who has read your wor…

Then I developed a new system at the racetrack. I pulled in $3,000 in a month and a half while only going to the track two or three times a week. I began to dream. I saw a little house ...

During the second and third grades I still didn’t get a chance to play baseball but I knew that somehow I was developing into a player. If I ever got a bat in my hands again I knew I wo...

this poet he’d been drinking 2 or 3 days and he walked out on the stage and looked at that audience and he just knew he was going to do it. there was a grand piano on stage and he walke...