I am deeply moved when I write. I get turned on by it. I've never used any drugs for stimulation. I don't use words loosely. When I'm working and the right word comes, there is an answering resonance within me. There is also a hardness of intention that goes with it. There is no idleness in it.

... an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.

Fidelity is for phonographs

I’ve had all the monstrosity I want.

...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.