That's what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn't worry - poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow

All these angels start coming out of the boxes and everywhere, guys carrying crucifixes and stuff all over the place, and the whole bunch of them - thousands of them - singing "Come All Ye Faithful" like mad. Big deal. It's supposed to be religious as hell, I know, and very pretty and all, but I can't see anything religious or pretty, for God's sake, about a bunch of actors carrying crucifixes all over the stage. When they all finished and started going out the boxes again, you could tell they could hardly wait to get a cigarette of something. I saw it with old Sally Hayes the year before, and she kept saying how beautiful it was, the costumes and all. I said old jesus probably would've puked if he could see it.

Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane--in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath--she had probably put herself in unnecessary danger.

Fuck you, angel. Fuck you and all God's little prison bitches. He slips you some cigarettes and a con job smile and you run off to do his dirty work for him. Go and scare some sinners. No one's listening to you here.

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an? other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.

I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

"Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.

"And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy's and talk about the day and type up your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don't listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you're sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the tv programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your

At one time I smoked but in 1959 I couldn't think of anything else to give up for Lent so I stopped - and I haven't had a cigarette since.

I have made it a rule never to smoke more that one cigar at a time.

In the movies Bette Davis lights two cigarettes and hands the second one to James Cagney. It was just so glamorous and romantic.

You better take advantage of the good cigars. You don't get much else in that job.

Maybe it's like becoming one with the cigar. You lose yourself in it everything fades away: your worries your problems your thoughts. They fade into the smoke and the cigar and you are at peace.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning sat down at the typewriter - now computer - lit up a cigarette.

Probably millions of Americans got up this morning with a cup of coffee a cigarette and a donut. No wonder they are sick and fouled up.

The focus on my appearance has really surprised me. I've always been a size 14 to 16 I don't care about clothes I'd rather spend my money on cigarettes and booze.

My memory of my mom is a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She was a runway fashion model and she was quite a glamorous woman.

My mom started smoking when she was 11. She went to the hill next door to try her first cigarette. She set the entire hill on fire but it didn't deter her.

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes and far more expensive.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.

It is common knowledge that smoking is considered one of the nation's leading causes of preventable death but it's less widely known that cigarettes are also the leading cause of fatal fires.

I should do something about the cigarettes I quite accept that it's bad for your health but you know a moderate tipple is positively beneficial and at certain times absolutely essential.