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.

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.

If you have two friends in your lifetime, you're lucky. If you have one good friend, you're more than lucky

You know what the crummiest feeling you can have is? To hate the person you love the best in the world.

Sixteen years on the streets and you can learn a lot. But all the wrong things, not the things you want to learn. Sixteen years on the streets and you see a lot. But all the wrong sights, not the things you want to see.

Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff.

We had played a kid's version of gang fighting called "Civil War," and then later we had got in on the real thing, we fought with chains and we fought barefisted and we fought Socs and we fought other grease gangs. It was a normal childhood.