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.

Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.

I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.

The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.