Quotes by "Jim Carroll"

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

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

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. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination.

Poverty of young men alone behind the stairways, who practice alchemy inside bottle caps, who know the altruism of a last syringe.

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

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.

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.