it is not very good to not get through whether it’s the wall the human mind

you haven’t lived until you’ve been in a flophouse with nothing but one light bulb

first of all, I had a hard time, a… locating the parking lot for the b… wasn’t off the main boulevard wher… the cars all driven by merciless k… were doing 55 mph in a 25 mph zone…

When I awakened it was 1:30 pm. I took a bath, got dressed, checked the mail. A letter from a young man in Glendale. "Dear Mr. Chinaski: I am a young writer and I think that I am a good...

That summer, July 1934, they gunned down John Dillinger outside the movie house in Chicago. He never had a chance. The Lady in Red had fingered him. More than a year earlier the banks h...

swans die in the Spring too and there it floated dead on a Sunday sideways circling in the current

I went to my place, started drinking. I snapped on the radio and found some classical music. I got my Coleman lantern out of the closet. I turned out the lights and sat playing with the...

I have been looking at the same lampshade for 5 years and it has gathered

I sat in the airport and waited. You never knew about photos. You could never tell. I was nervous. I felt like vomiting. I lit a cigarette and gagged. Why did I do these things? I didn’...

yeah sure, I’ll be in unless I’m… don’t knock if the lights are out or you hear voices or then I might be reading Proust if someone slips Proust under my d…

the canaries were there, and the l… and the old woman with warts; and I was there, a child and I touched the piano keys as they talked—

the kid went back to New York Cit… he met in a kibbutz. he left his mother at the age of 32, a well-kept fellow, sense of h… wore the same pair of shorts

they photograph you on your porch and on your couch and standing in the courtyard or leaning against your car these photographers

listening to Wagner as outside in the dark the wind bl… trees wave and shake lights go off and on the walls creak and the… bed...

they talk down through the centuries to us, and this we need more and more, the statues and paintings in midnight age