When stuck, hit the road.

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Ah, Evelyn and Vivian, I love you both, I love you for your sad lives, the empty misery of your coming home at dawn. You too are alone, but you are not like Arturo Bandini, who is neither fish, fowl nor good red herring. So have your champagne, because I love you both, and you too, Vivian, even if your mouth looks like it had been dug out with raw fingernails and your old child's eyes swim in blood written like mad sonnets.

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I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed.

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We talked, she and I. She asked about my work and it was a pretense, she was not interested in my work. And when I answered, it was a pretense. I was not interested in my work either. There was only one thing that interested us, and she knew it. She had made it plain by her coming.

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So what’s the use of repentance, and what do you care for goodness, and what if you should die in a quake, so who the hell cares? So I walked downtown, so these were the high buildings, so let the earthquake come, let it bury me and my sins, so who the hell cares? No good to God or man, die one way or another, a quake or a hanging, it didn’t matter why or when or how.

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You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.

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I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living

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Ask the dust on the road! Ask the Joshua trees standing alone where the Mojave begins. Ask them about Camilla Lopez, and they will whisper her name.

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Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit.

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Like my father, I am very impatient. I have a strong bullshit detector. I may finish one book in twenty that I have started.

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