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.
Jim Carroll
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Artists have nothing to do with the deranged, vaguely connected actions of a few celebrated nutcases.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
