Novelists From California

"For twelve months now, since I first began the practice of law, since I became an attorney, a man who speak for others, a counselor at law who has the power to address the court, that’s right, a big man, a mature person who helps others in distress—for approximately 365 days time has been nothing but a never-ending experience that meets me in the morning just like it left me off the night before. No longer am I the clear-headed mathematician of my college years. I used to have the answers; and if I didn’t, I could always turn to the back of the book or ask Professor Blackburn at Wednesday morning’s advanced algebra class. For a year now, my only conscious concern has been the pain in my stomach, the arguments of Dr. Serbin, and the schedules of the television shows. I know them all by heart. I can quote every single fucking show on Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, and, you won’t believe it, even on the educational station, Channel 9. I am the world’s only living T.V. Guide, that’s really what I am. And they want me to counsel them!"

"Young, blond fags with powder-blue eyes and soft shoes skipped along arm-in-arm. Chinese girls with long hair and black stockings carried metal pots into Ernie’s Delicatessen for bean cake, barbequed duck, Chinese curds and steamed rice. Art students from the Art Institute, draftsmen from Heald’s College and law students from S.F. Law School walked by in carefree abandon, none of them in pain, all with beautiful girls in red slippers. They had leather, beads and books and pipes and scabs of hair on their interesting faces. Polk Street at night was always Christmas Eve for lonely men such as myself."

"I’m an innocent, brown-eyed child of the sun. Just a peach-picker’s boy from the West Side. Riverbank. My father’s a janitor with only a third-grade education and my mother makes tortillas at 5:00 A.M. before she goes to the cannery."

"The truth of the matter is that death is a mystery to me. I have no opinion on the subject."

"Ever since I’d shown my bleeding arms to my sweetheart we hadn’t spoken a word. I’d simply decided to wait until she told me she appreciated carved tatoos. But she never did. She just ignored my obvious suffering. The pain in my gut, the secret gnawing at my belly didn’t concern her one damn bit. Things got so bad for me I finally took to smoking like all my buddies were already doing. I rolled up whole pages of old funny books and smoked the shit until my lungs ached. I’d cut vines from the ivy that crawled up the sides of the chicken coop and puff on my homemade cigars until my head buzzed."

"I simply nod, for I have already noticed the short distance between his right and left eyes. It is my secret way of detecting fags. I know he will speak. And the first thing the idiot says is, “Are you by any chance Samoan?” All my life strangers have been interested in my ancestry. There is something about my bearing that cries out for history. I’ve been mistaken for American Indian, Spanish, Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan and Arabian. No one has ever asked me if I’m a spic or a greaser. Am I Samoan? “Aren’t we all?” I groan."

"That same night I went into the chicken coop, took my hooked knife which I used to pit peaches with, and carved her initials on the back side of my left hand … JA. Jane Addison. My first true love. The original Miss It. I was in such a fog that I forgot to cover it with a glove or something. At supper, right in front of my mother, my brother Bob said in a loud voice, “What’s that on your hand?” I pretended not to hear. I quickly switched my fork to my right hand and put my left hand under the table. “Hey, mom. Oscar cut himself,” the bastard said. “What?” she cried out. She couldn’t stand violence unless it was part of some beating to teach me respect."

"I always say that a girl never really looks as well as she does on board a steamship, or even a yacht."

"To listen to Mr. Engelbart that day almost five years ago was to realize that the computer industry, when it started, was not simply about becoming a chief executive or retiring on stock options at 35. It was to remember that real innovation — the stuff that made computers so much more than "crummy factors of production" — comes from mysterious places, wild people, dreamers and tinkerers, and to remember all the skepticism they had to endure."

"I have a suggestion for Microsoft — no fancy programming required. Just let us users hang out a "Do Not Disturb" sign. Then leave us alone. We're dreaming."

"We build our computers the way we build our cities--over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."

"Would you believe that sometimes I am so tired, or the cave is so dark, I'm not even sure of the colours I give them? Would you believe that men have been given blues, have been set aside to die, suffering from nothing more than dehydration or a broken arm? Disturbing, I know, but it's true. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"

"Do you know what Pesh Merga means? It means 'those who face death'. . . I myself have never seen one face death; they all turn away at the end. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"

"We've been losing wars forever; it's what we Kurds do best . . . We are like the little guy at the bar who wants to fight all the big men. We get beaten up by one, then get up off the floor and go for another. Over and over. A lifetime of war, can you imagine? - Dr Ahmet Talzani"

"My little tags are for them, because they need to believe there is a system. For me, I know it is all fate . . . Some live, some die, that's all. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"

"Legs will always be the biggest problem. That’s always the case. Legs, legs, legs. For every arm I’ve amputated here, I’ve probably taken ten legs. Puzzling, isn’t it? . . . I think human legs * simply weren't designed for modern war. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"

"It leaves scars in my head, it leaves scars all the time. - Colin"

""If I stay too long in here, I begin killing more patients than I save." He laughed lightly. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"

"Homeland. It doesn't matter what you do or even what you believe, you never escape the homeland. It always keeps you. They talk of free will, but we are all just homing pigeons in the end. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"

"Ah well, these little mysteries, morbid curiosities, war is full of them. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"

"There is no pattern to who lives and who dies in war . . . In war, people die because they do. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"

"Elena understood that sometimes it was a terrible thing to be the one who lived, that this could be a weight in your heart that never left."

"I don’t care what anyone says, it affects you, it never stops affecting you."

"I found my smartest patients were the most difficult, and I think Carlos was the smartest one of all. - Joaquin Morales"

"We are all animals . . . special animals, but still animals. - Joaquin Morales"

"Some live, some die. It's the only way to view it. Anything else is just self-torture and arrogance. Because we are not gods, none of us are gods. - Dr Ahmet Talzani"

"Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was still all things at once: the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect."

"Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed objectively for strength to make the flight with grace."

"Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play."

"The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."

"Art is what is irresistible."

"All things lie dark in possibility."

"Each person belongs to the environment, in his own person, as himself."

"I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being."

"Standing at the edge of our city, a man could feel that we had made this place of streets and dwellings in the stillness of the desert, and that we had done a brave thing... Or a man could feel that we had made this city in the desert and that it was a fake thing and that our lives were empty lives, and that we were the contemporaries of the jack rabbits."

"A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values."

"The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited."

"Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?"

"I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful."

"Don't forget that some things count more than other things."

"Art can no longer afford to be contemptuous of politics, and it appears to be time politics took a little instruction from art."

"Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it."

"My daughter, before she was sixteen, and especially before she was six, absolutely stunned me every day by the simple beauty and sweetness of her truth."

"The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith."

"Chance meetings with living saints and sons of bitches goes on and on."

"A neighborhood has a kind of mystical identity which one scarcely suspects let alone notices while one is living there, for living uses up all of a man's time and attention. But in retrospect sooner or later a man remembers an old neighborhood and suddenly notices that there was something fantastic about the place."

"It is better to be a good human being than to be a bad one. It is just naturally better."

"Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it."

"The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?"

"I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things."