“Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag”
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner’s pies
And walked off to look for America

“Kathy,” I said, as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw
I’ve come to look for America”

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said, “Be careful, his bow tie is really a camera”

“Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat”
“We smoked the last one an hour ago”
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

“Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, thought I knew she was sleeping.
“I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why”
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They’ve all come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America

• Paul Simon

 

‘Every human being could be said to be as much an accumulation of stories as of molecules.  I am, in part, all the things I have read over the years.  They don’t leave me.  They settle inside me like sediment.’

• Jan Kjærstad

 

“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys – to woo women – and, in that endeavour, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.”

•  Robin Williams, Dead Poets Society  (R.I.P.)

 

“Unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it…”

• Charles Bukowski on writing

 

‘There aren’t spaces for people to say “I don’t feel so good” in our society. There’s something in the cultural madness about the requisite to always perform happy…’

• Susie Orbach 3/08/2014