If you're a smart writer, you listen.

When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.

a dream is only a memory of the future

Western music is arguably America's greatest contribution to the 20th century, cultural or otherwise.

If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.

By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.

Is the humanism intuitive or labored over?, the answer is: Yes. It begins intuitively, it becomes the reason for writing the thing, and then it's to be considered and fine-tuned and even calculated.

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

For better or worse I'm the writer I am today because of hearing those Dylan records. For better and most certainly not for worse, I'm the person I am today because of hearing Charles.

You don't have to be broken to create something beautiful. You have to be willing.

The prisoner of doubt ends his stint [through suicide], released to the custody of that final question mark which punctuates every life sentence.

Wow, we're identical!

There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection.

I don't really know Hollywood, and I think that L.A. needs a bit of time to really know the city, because it's such a huge city.

Attempted murder should carry the same penalty as first-degree murder. Otherwise, you're simply rewarding incompetence.

Are gods more ruthless than mortals? Have they no mercy for youth? no love for the souls who have loved them?

You never can tell when a bad thing might make a good thing happen. I realized that good and bad were always there and always mixed up together in a tangle.

Lying to a committee is a very grave abuse, and there ought to be a clear punishment.

When I was a kid we were so poor, if I hadn't been a boy I wouldn't have had anything to play with.