Quotes from Jim Carroll

I love kids that come to shows, little kids coming up to you with braces; like, some kid came up to me in a parking lot outside a show in Santa Cruz - he was about 14 or 15 - and he said, 'Y'know, I love 'The Basketball Diaries,' but I hope your next book of poetry isn't gonna be as academic as 'Living at the Movies' was.'

When I came back to New York, it was such a joke because I was always referred to as the pure young poet who wasn't in it for what he could get out of it. And all of a sudden, the pure young poet comes back... and I'm hanging out with the Rolling Stones.

I love this mansion, though it is too many windows ...to open halfway each morning ...to close halfway each night.

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

I once said a poet has the right to sing as loudly and vocally as he wants to. Most poets should face a rock n' roll audience for one night to keep them honest.

Artists have nothing to do with the deranged, vaguely connected actions of a few celebrated nutcases.

I do believe that a poet would possess a stronger intuitive sense of phrasing with a rock song. There is a way to tap into the emotions of an audience simply by the cross of a certain phrase, even a single word, against a certain chord.

It's always been the same, growing up in Manhattan... the idea of living within a giant archer's target... for use by the bad Russia bowman with the atomic arrows.

I was this Catholic kid, and I never really lost that. I loved the rituals of Catholicism. The mass is a magic ritual; it's a transubstantiation, and the stations of the cross - I mean, a crown of thorns? Getting whipped? It's punk rock.

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

It was a dream, not a nightmare, a beautiful dream I could never imagine in a thousand nods. There was a girl next to me who wasn't beautiful until she smiled and I felt that smile come at me in heat waves following, soaking through my body and out my finger tips in shafts of color and I knew somewhere in the world, somewhere, that there was love for me.

I'll Die For Your Sins If You Live For mine.

Little kids shoot marbles where the branches break the sun into graceful shafts of light… I just want to be pure.

You're growing up. And rain sort of remains on the branches of a tree that will someday rule the Earth. And it's good that there is rain. It clears the month of your sorry rainbow expressions, and it clears the streets of the silent armies... so we can dance.

they're fucking up minds they do not own.

That, I realized, is the great beauty of dreams: the devil may inevitably find a way to jerk you off, but you can always wake up before he makes you cum.

You see, you just don't know I'm here to give you my heart And you want some fashion show

I love this mansion, though it is too many windows ...to open halfway each morning ...to close halfway each night.

Violence is so terribly fast . . . the most perverse thing about the movies is the way they portray it in slow motion, allowing it to be something sensuous . . . the viewer's lips slightly wet as the scene plays out. Violence is nothing like that. It is lightning fast, chaotic, and totally intangible.

all right buddah gets a backstage pass but all his friends have to pay

Back then, Billy imagined that drops of rain were unanswered prayers falling back to earth.

Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.

To sit in this awful mess and maybe smoke some dope and watch some innocuous shit on a dumb glass tube and feel fine about it and know there's really nothing you have to do, ever, but feel your warm friend's silent content. You don't feel guilty about not fighting a war or carrying signs to protest it either. We've just mastered the life of doing nothing, which when you think about it, may be the hardest thing of all to do.

On a whim, he stopped and bought a watch from a sidewalk vendor. Normally, Billy could not abide keeping time, especially when it was attached to one's body. Time was like a relentlessly needy lapdog one had to haul around. It barked too much and had no sense of loyalty.