It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

Listening to it was like having a mud-slimed piece of silk drawn lightly back and forth across her face.

It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman.

Remember in elementary school you were told that in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file from smallest to tallest? What is the logic in that? What, do tall people burn slower?

For some reason California's always been where the struggle is about how much authority you can impose on people's private lives. It seems to show up there most clearly. They had a helmet law for motorcycles in California and the bikies were saying things like, "It restricts my vision. I can't hear what my bike's doing. If it was on fire I wouldn't know it until my ass caught." And at the bottom line what the bikies were saying was, "Look, it's my goddamn head and if I want to splatter my brains all over the guardrails on the Coast Highway, super for me."

It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.