Jim Carroll
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.
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.
Artists have nothing to do with the deranged, vaguely connected actions of a few celebrated nutcases.
When I came back to New York, it was such a joke because I was always referred to as the pure young poet who wasn't in it for what he could get out of it. And all of a sudden, the pure young poet comes back... and I'm hanging out with the Rolling Stones.
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.
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.
I was this Catholic kid, and I never really lost that. I loved the rituals of Catholicism. The mass is a magic ritual; it's a transubstantiation, and the stations of the cross - I mean, a crown of thorns? Getting whipped? It's punk rock.
I love kids that come to shows, little kids coming up to you with braces; like, some kid came up to me in a parking lot outside a show in Santa Cruz - he was about 14 or 15 - and he said, 'Y'know, I love 'The Basketball Diaries,' but I hope your next book of poetry isn't gonna be as academic as 'Living at the Movies' was.'
I once said a poet has the right to sing as loudly and vocally as he wants to. Most poets should face a rock n' roll audience for one night to keep them honest.
I can't sing that well, but when punk-rock came along, it changed all that.
I should have stayed an athlete, body well-tuned, cruising around with my accountant in a Porsche, maroon and chrome.
It's always been the same, growing up in Manhattan... the idea of living within a giant archer's target... for use by the bad Russia bowman with the atomic arrows.
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.
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 was always the young guy. And when you're successful when you're young, it leads to an arrested adolescence or something, y'know.
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.
Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.Collection: Conscience
It was a dream, not a nightmare, a beautiful dream I could never imagine in a thousand nods. There was a girl next to me who wasn't beautiful until she smiled and I felt that smile come at me in heat waves following, soaking through my body and out my finger tips in shafts of color and I knew somewhere in the world, somewhere, that there was love for me.Collection: Beautiful
I'll Die For Your Sins If You Live For mine.Collection: Sin
You see, you just don't know I'm here to give you my heart And you want some fashion showCollection: Fashion
My voice has a quiver/ A quiver is where you keep arrows until you shoot them.Collection: Voice
Little kids shoot marbles where the branches break the sun into graceful shafts of light… I just want to be pure.Collection: Kids
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.Collection: Loyalty
I was a Catholic boy, redeemed through pain, not through joy.Collection: Pain
Violence is so terribly fast . . . the most perverse thing about the movies is the way they portray it in slow motion, allowing it to be something sensuous . . . the viewer's lips slightly wet as the scene plays out. Violence is nothing like that. It is lightning fast, chaotic, and totally intangible.Collection: Play
You're growing up. And rain sort of remains on the branches of a tree that will someday rule the Earth. And it's good that there is rain. It clears the month of your sorry rainbow expressions, and it clears the streets of the silent armies... so we can dance.Collection: Growing Up
Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Falling In Love
I love this mansion, though it is too many windows ...to open halfway each morning ...to close halfway each night.Collection: Morning
all right buddah gets a backstage pass but all his friends have to payCollection: Pay
Our team is good at getting dressed real quick, because we're the type of team that wears their uniforms all day.Collection: Real
If you are a parent, if you are an educator, there are very many good and powerful reasons to take children onto the Internet, but you have to be involved with them-you cannot expect government authorities or industry authorities or other people to do your job for you, and that is to help guard your children against some of these things that are occurring out there.Collection: Jobs
Billy was fascinated by the television. At its most basic level, it occupied his time and shut out the demons of isolation. This was another irony because, for so long, he had shunned the tube for a similar purpose-to prevent it from bombarding his brain with demons of banality. However, each time he turned the machine on, he began to discover a world of assorted delights, as well as gain insight into the insidious manner in which this medium was shaping the mass psyche. If nothing else, he learned there was nothing innocuous about it.Collection: Long
There are times when the vehicle is in the ready mode, there are no indications externally that the vehicle can move and yet if someone accidentally hits the pedal, say when someone's inside, the car will move.Collection: Moving