It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.

Never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.

She didn't look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn't quite made the grade down south, or a very successful amateur tart on the verge of turning pro. Whatever her business was, there had to be sex in it. She was as full of sex as a grape is full of juice, and so young that it hadn't begun to sour.

Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born.

Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance calls with your inner ear, and there's no way to hang up.

The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.

I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.

No one looks at the mountains. But they were there, making them all look silly.

The apparent facts, if you like. I'm not a philosopher. We lawyers don't deal in ultimate realities. Who knows what they are? We deal in appearances.

You are joking. You must want money. You work for money, don't you?""I want it very badly," I said. "But I can't take this money. It wouldn't belong to me, I would belong to it. It would expect me to do things, and I would have to do them. Sit on the lid of this mess of yours, the way Marfeld did, until dry rot sets in.

I like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of power, I guess, to take my life in my hands and know damn well I’m not going to lose it.

Flames entered the room like dancers, orange-colored and whirring.

The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution.

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.

In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.

If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature. There is a peculiar sense in which this city existing mainly on film and tape is our national capital, alas, and not just the capital of California. It's the place where our children learn how and what to dream and where everything happens just before, or just after, it happens to us.

He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man.

On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.

The walls of books around him dense with the past formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

There's nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.