You take up for your buddies, no matter what they do. When you're a gang, you stick up for the members. If you don't stick up for them, stick together, make like brothers, it isn't a gang anymore. It's a pack. A snarling, distrustful, bickering park like the Socs in their social clubs or the street gangs in New York or the wolves in the timber.

I like having a private name and a public name. It helps keep things straight.

California is like a beautiful wild kid on heroin, high as a kite and thinking she's on top of the world, not knowing she's dying, not believing it even if you show her the marks.

I made up my mind that I'd get out of that place and I didI learned that if you want to get somewhere, you just make up your mind and work like hell til you get there. If you want to go somewhere in life, you just have to work till you make it.

Y'all were heroes from the beginning. You just didn't 'turn' all of a sudden

...but I've never regretted it. You can't regret experience.

You know a guy a longtime, and I mean really know him, you don't get used to the idea that he's dead just overnight.