John Fante Quotes
For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don't believe in yourself.
If there is work there is warmth, that when a man has freedom of movement it is enough, for then his blood is hot too
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.
I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living
Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town!
Arturo Bandini: -What does happiness mean to you Camilla? Camilla: -That you can fall in love with whoever you want to, and not feel ashamed of it.
Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths I once believed and now they were beliefs I felt were myths.
Look at the people who review. Look at their commitment to being "right" and "safe". If I had listened to my critics I would have given up years ago.
Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets, I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen, as sure as there's a God in heaven.
Well, this is good for me, this is experience, I am here for a reason, these moments run into pages, the seamy side of life.
Like my father, I am very impatient. I have a strong bullshit detector. I may finish one book in twenty that I have started.
Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit.
I write every morning. Two hours. Then I take a break and become my own secretary for a few hours. If I am "hot" I write in the afternoon and at night too.
So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your lash-in-the-pen genius, your one story-writer: a thief.
Someday, as an exercise, you might ask a writer to give himself the questions he wants to answer. If you really want a writer's opinions, you have to ask for them. What you read might surprise you.
