I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.

Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

It's better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.

When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.

News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.

Death meant little to me. It was the last joke in a series of bad jokes.

like the fox I run with the hunted and if I’m not the happiest man on earth I’m surely the luckiest man alive.