I Could Not Take Lightly The Idea

Though They May Not Always Be Handsome Men Doomed To Evil Posses The Manly Virtues.

Added To The Moral Solitude Of The Murderer Comes The Solitude Of The Artist, Which Can Acknowledge No Authority, Save That Of Another Artist.

I Recognize In Thieves, Traitors And Murderers, In The Ruthless And The Cunning, A Deep Beauty - A Sunken Beauty.

They Remain Dead, The People I Try To Resuscitate By Straining To Hear What They Say. But The Illusion Is Not Pointless, Or Not Quite, Even If The Reader Knows All This Better Than I Do. One Thing A Book Tries To Do, Beneath The Disguise Of Words And Causes And Clothes And Grief, Is Show The Skeleton And The Skeleton Dust To Come. The Author Too, Like Those Of Whom He Speaks, Is Dead.

In Reviewing My Life, In Tracing Its Course, I Fill My Cell With The Pleasure Of Being What For Want Of A Trifle I Failed To Be, Recapturing, So That I May Hurl Myself Into Them As Into Dark Pits, Those Moments When I Strayed Through The Trap-ridden Compartments Of A Subterranean Sky