We parked in back and walked down the stairs with their polished brass railings, past the old-fashioned kitchen. We could see the chefs cooking. It smelled like stew, or meat loaf, the way time should smell, solid and nourishing.
You can’t shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don’t know.
Never apologize. Never explain.
This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment only to be washed away.
I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, men who made you love them then changed their minds.
Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?
Beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. But I didn’t want to start. I knew how it would play. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.
Many women get involved with a man that you pretty much know isn’t suitable and you’re kind of breaking your rules, but he’s attractive in some unknown way. And then he doesn’t even realize what a sacrifice you’re making by being with him and he dumps you!
To make films, you have to have boundless energy; you have to work and play with others really, really well, and I’m really a more contemplative kind of person. I like to sit at home and think, a lot.
We don’t have a unitary society anymore, you know; it’s very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.
When you’re a little kid, you are small, your life is small – and you’re terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.
I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.
I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do ’cause then at least I would’ve done what I wanted to do in life. What’s that worth?
I love Derrick Brown for the surprise of one word waking up next to another. One moment tender, funny or romantic, the next, visceral, ironic and relevatory-here is the full chaos of life. An amazing talent.
I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.
Being in the library is so addictive for me that I really have to exercise self-control so I can get some writing done at home.
If this was a sandalwood pyre she would have thrown herself in and this paper she’d become would have caught fire and she and him could sail away like two birds.
I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn’t used to being so complicated.
I wondered where he was now whether I would ever hear him again. Whether someone would love him, someday show him what beauty mean’t.