My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

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

You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?

Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.