A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.

Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.

I think that-that anyone, the painter, the musician, the writer works in a-a kind of an-an insane fury. He's demon-driven. He can get up feeling rotten, with a hangover, or with-with actual pain, and-and if he gets to work, the first thing he knows, he don't remember that pain, that hangover-he's too busy.

She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.

Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.