Quotes from Carolyn See

I don't believe you can buy or sell 'cool.'

Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.

Whenever I open a book about jazz, I turn to the index and look for Lennie Tristano, the incredible pianist; Lee Konitz, the luminous alto sax player; and Warne Marsh, the tenor player who captured some of the most beautiful sounds in the world.

There's a saying that when you go on traveling tours, you get to know whom the designated jerk is going to be within three days, and if you don't know it by then, you're the jerk.

Life is a matter of courtship and wooing, flirting and chatting.

It was in 'Esquire' in the 1970s that I first learned Nora Ephron's recipe for borscht - certainly an editorial first for that manly magazine.

I'd never heard of Robert Hellenga; I didn't think a book with the name 'Snakewoman of Little Egypt' would hold any appeal for me at all.

What is 'cool,' anyway? Maybe it's Warne Marsh, almost totally obscure and penniless, coming in late to a fourth-rate Hollywood nightclub, playing like an angel with a couple of sidemen, but never speaking to or even acknowledging another human being.

'A Long Way Gone' says something about human nature that we try, most of the time, to ignore.

Very much as men project weird fantasies on women, the people in New York project weird fantasies on California.

If you are in any way squeamish or genteel, skip 'Gillespie and I.' If you'd like to know a little more about the seamy side of the human condition, by all means, pick this one up.

I hope someday to see California literature become a part of mainstream American literature, and I hope to be part of that process.

'Gillespie and I' is a deliciously morbid, almost smutty story, a compendium of inappropriate wants and smarmy desires.

Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.

You can go a surprisingly long time without figuring out the kind of person you are and in what direction your life is taking you.

It's my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest. It's like falling in love, only more so. It feels like something criminal. It feels like unspeakably wild sex. So, think: When you feel the overpowering need to go out and find some unspeakably wild sex, do you rush to tell your mom about it?

Everyone in the world should read this book... We should read it to learn about the world and what it means to be human.

Wake up! Keep waking up! Wake up more and more often!

It's only four pages, five days a week. It won't kill you. You can't "fall behind" and you can't "get ahead." Every day is a new one thousand words.

If you think finding the right place just happens, you've got another think.

Because under his sedate blazer and his knobby chest, there beat a heart, remember, that loved the tango.

But I say there was a race of hardy laughers, mystics, crazies, who knew their real homes, or who had been drawn to this gold coast for years, and they lived through the destroying light, and on, into Light ages.

Finally, it was the city that held us, the city they said had no center, that all of us had come to from all over America because this was the place to find dreams and pleasure and love. I noticed--looking at headlines--that some cities emptied and some didn't. Ours didn't, not completely.

Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.