I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent to children.

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

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.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.