People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

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

Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.

The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.