To live in a world meant for other people

The landmark Chelsea Hotel was built in the 1880s as one of the city's first private co-ops. In 1905, it re-opened as a hotel. Over the years, the hotel has been the home of numerous writers, musicians, artists, and actors, including Dee Dee Ramone, Bob Dylan, Virgil Thomson, Sam Shepard, Arthur C. Clarke, Arthur Miller, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, Janis Joplin, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and Patti Smith. In the 1970s, a New York landmark himself, Stanley Bard took over the management of the hotel, and his son David joined him later on. In the autumn of 1978, punk rocker Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in Room 100, a room that has joined the other ghosts that make up the Chelsea. View from the Balcony, Room 325 The year is 1995 or 1996. I enter the Chelsea Hotel, push through the heavy glass doors. The light in the lobby adjusts to my eyes. Art runs floor to ceiling around the room. Obscure paintings. Little known artists. A s...

Once the stormy years of his early struggles were over, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had followed a set routine and achieved a respectability and prestige that had no equal in the province. He arose at the crack of dawn, when he began to take his secret medicines: potassium bromide to raise his spirits, salicylates for the ache in his bones when it rained, ergosterol drops for vertigo, belladonna for sound sleep. He took something every hour, always in secret, because in his long life as a doctor and teacher he had always opposed prescribing palliatives for old age: it was easier for him to bear other people’s pains than his own. In his pocket he always carried a little pad of camphor that he inhaled deeply when no one was watching to calm his fear of so many medicines mixed together. - Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera My books on Amazon   |   Subscribe to this site   |   Contac t me   

She turned the light on and said, “Look at the baby.” My fears were so powerful I couldn't move to look at the center of the bed. She said again, “Look at the baby.” I didn't hear sadness in her voice, and that helped me to break the bonds of terror. The baby was no longer in the center of the bed. At first I thought he had moved. But after closer investigation I found that I was lying on my stomach with my arm bent at a right angle. Under the tent of blanket, which was poled by my elbow and forearm, the baby slept touching my side. Mother whispered, “See, you don't have to think about doing the right thing. If you're for the right thing, then you do it without thinking.” - Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings My books on Amazon   |   Subscribe to this site   |   Contac t me   

I first read sections of this book as a child (7 or 8), tricked by its title. At the time I think it is meant for someone like me, pick it from the shelf at a friend's house. I don't understand most of what I read, but I do sense the emotional violence, the extreme tension. It is real. I can feel it. And it comes off the page. A remarkable discovery.  I have since re-read the book many times, seen the movie with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and seen the play on Broadway with Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner. It remains my favorite stage play and one of my favorite books in my library.  But nothing stays with me like that first time I pull it off the shelf as a child, get ripped open, exposed to the raw and emotional possibilities of words on the page. If any book has influenced the depths of my writing, this one has. My books on Amazon   |   Subscribe to this site   |   Contac t me   

A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I'm going to apply myself when I go back to school next September. It's such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you're going to do until you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question. - J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye My books on Amazon   |   Subscribe to this site   |   Contac t me   

Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. The threat of being outdoors surfaced frequently in those days. Every possibility of excess was curtailed with it. If somebody ate too much, he could end up outdoors. If somebody used too much coal, he could end up outdoors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves outdoors. Sometimes mothers put their sons outdoors, and when that happened, regardless of what the son had done, all sympathy was with him. - Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye My books on Amazon   |   Subscribe to this site   |   Contac t me   

Just before I taped him, Mr. Clutter asked me - and these were his last words - wanted to know how his wife was, if she was all right, and I said she was fine, she was ready to go to sleep, and I told him it wasn't long till morning, and how in the morning somebody would find them, and then all of it, me and Dick and all, would seem like something they dreamed. I wasn't kidding him. I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat. - Truman Capote, In Cold Blood My books on Amazon   |   Subscribe to this site   |   Contac t me   

Nobody's asking you to remember every single goddamn Warner Brother's epic...just one! One single little epic! Bette Davis has peritonitis in the end...she's got this big black fright wig she wears all through the picture and she gets peritonitis, and she's married to Joseph Cotten or something... *** I said I was impressed, Martha. I'm beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up? *** Alright... what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it’s funny, so you can contradict me and say it’s sad? Or do you want me to say it’s sad so you can turn around and say no, it’s funny. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know! *** Martha is 108... years old. She weighs somewhat more than that. *** George is bogged down in the History Department. He’s an old bog in the History Department, that’s what George is. A bog. . . . A fen. . . . A G.D. swamp. Ha, ha, ha, HA! A SWAMP! Hey, swamp! ...

My only company was an obese, ancient cat I inherited when the ancient Irish lady upstairs was evicted. The cat barely moved. Once a day she dragged herself to her food where she fell asleep with her head in the dish. - Larry Mitchell, My Life as a Mole My books on Amazon   |   Subscribe to this site   |   Contac t me   

Lydia looked good. The light came through the curtains and shone on her. She had an orange in her hand and was tossing it into the air. The orange spun through the sunlit morning.  - Charles Bukowski, Women My books on Amazon   |   Subscribe to this site   |   Contac t me