Quotes from Jim Carroll

He was about to find out that when you open a door with a psychiatrist's name on it, you'd better be prepared to witness exactly how fucked up your life has become.

I sleep on a tar roof scream my songs into lazy floods of stars… a white powder paddles through blood and heart and the returns pure and easy… This city is on my side.

Our team is good at getting dressed real quick, because we're the type of team that wears their uniforms all day.

It always puzzled Billy that so many of his most fond and formative memories took place in winter. The fact was that he never liked this season, except as a young child when falling white flakes were magical, and the sun on the snow-covered baseball fields in the park was the color of light through quartz.

I want to talk. I talk to everybody, and it pisses me off when they interpret to talk back. I sometimes think of offering money to friends to buy their turn in a conversation.

I think of poetry and how I see it as just a raw block of stone ready to be shaped, that way words are never a horrible limit to me, just tools to shape.

It was in Central Park near the lake and I watched a weeping willow turn into a giant rooster and fly off. No tree remained. It glided beautifully into the sky, a big blue barnyard. My mind went with it, something all you bald head generals and wheelchair senators could never imagine.

I'm beginning to have second thoughts regarding the validity of Gloria's theory that I can overcome my heroin addiction by the simple process of shooting up vast quantities of speed with her twenty times daily.

Now I got these diaries that have the greatest hero a writer needs, this crazy fucking New York.

I'm just really a wise ass kid getting wiser and I'm going to get even somehow for your dumb hatreds and all them war baby dreams you left in my scarred bed with dreams of bombs falling above that cliff I'm hanging steady to.

I wait on the origin of night's sounds waking. I know that here only the blind man sings, even in rain The notes of drenched violins rise like warped mirrors' and the last clouds part slowly, like a cracked wheel.

Rock and roll kind of screwed up my voice poetically. I found myself having this 'Beat' voice in my poems. It was like this self-fulfilled prophecy because everybody was calling me this rock poet, this Beat poet.

I need a consistency of my moods if there is to be any consistency in my style. I can't attempt to write always in the hollow flux of desperation and incipient terror.

When I was about 9 years old, man, I realized that the real thing was not only to do what you were doing totally great, but to look totally great while you were doing it.

I was always the young guy. And when you're successful when you're young, it leads to an arrested adolescence or something, y'know.

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

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

It's too late to fall in love with Sharon Tate / But it's too soon to ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb.

It's easy to get by on a facade of fancy style, but sooner or later, people are going to see through it. I'm trying to be as honest as possible.

I should have stayed an athlete, body well-tuned, cruising around with my accountant in a Porsche, maroon and chrome.

These guys were always saying, 'The minute you get onstage, it's great, no matter how much you're hurting.' But that didn't work for me. There were some nights I did not want to get out there.

Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations... With basketball, you can correct your own mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair.

Sex is no longer a beautiful thing, she said. It has become an entirely separate entity from what was quaintly known as making love. It's been transformed into a game between the sexes. It is as deceptive as chess and as anonymous as those men in helmets, racing cars on TV. This generation of men and women have turned it into a frenetically overenergetic contest and a performance. The more outlandish the game, the more popular it becomes.

I have to reregister a room for my heart. It's been waiting a long time, somewhere outside, without so much as a whisper of protest. That abandonment wasn't just an abuse, it was a sin.