If you are doing a piece about somebody, even if you admire them tremendously and express that in the piece, express that admiration, if they're not used to being written about, if they're civilians, [...] they're not used to seeing themselves through other people's eyes. So you will always see them from a slightly different angle than they see themselves, and they feel a little betrayed by that.

In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.

Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.

Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.