Quotes from Eve Babitz

it seemed much more likely to scald and burn from sex and rage instead.

But to be corrupt, you must once have been innocent - and I guess some people never were.

It seemed to her that she'd been smoking in order to get through the days, not that her days were ornamented by cigarettes.

Still, if you ask me, some parts are just as beautiful as my dream version—even more beautiful if you subscribe to the Tennessee Williams decadence-as-poetry theory that ravaged radiance is even better than earnest maintenance.

Hollywood, after all, is the home of those whom silent star Mae Murray called the "self-enchanted." And having grown up in Hollywood, I've known a lot of self-enchanted people. Not since the pharaohs thought they were gods have so many human beings believed that they themselves (and not their publicists or destiny or some larger force) were responsible for the fact that so many other human beings worshiped them.

Well, who is he?' I asked, the first time I saw Mary with his glazed expression. 'Money,' Mary said.

We live in a world where whoever sedates us with the most glamour and captures our imaginations with the greatest intensity becomes history.

The rooms in those days were unfashionably sad enough to commit suicide in, and, in fact, that to me was the Château's charm, that it didn't have any objections to one's committing suicide. Things since then had gone steadily downhill

writers all had drinking problems in the twentieth century, and once she got the $1,080 check, she was obviously a writer and it was obviously the twentieth century, so of course she had a drinking problem.

became clear to me that beauty has nothing to do with fashion, that love can conquer anything, sex is art, and let's see . . . hope springs eternal. I love the rain.

How could they all just casually drink Coca-Cola when one sip, and it tasted like musty trunks? How on earth could anyone eat a hamburger unless they were starving?

I'm glad I wasn't seated next to Celia, because what is there to say to someone younger than you who marries for money, except "How do you like your money?

Though I have no kids and Hollywood doesn't exist, I firmly believe, however, that it did exist. And like Rome, we are living amidst the fallen columns and clothes-lined courtyards, in the ruins of an empire of the self-enchanted which was once, briefly, more devastating than Caesar's and still brings respectable families to a hot, windy intersection in August to sigh with unnoticed despondence, "…Well…here we are…Hollywood and Vine.

There are a lot of people who don't grow limp with hatred when they're kept waiting. I know a whole bunch of people who don't consider the concept of fifteen minutes time at all. So if they say they'll meet you at 11:00 and they show up at 11:25, they apologize (if they remember) for being ten minutes late—the other fifteen minutes never existed and there is some sort of common understanding among most people that those fifteen minutes are a grace period.

They're right. Los Angeles isn't a city. It's a gigantic, sprawling, ongoing studio. Everything is off the record. People don't have time to apologize for its not being a city when their civilized friends suspect them of losing track of the point.

you don't know what life is. One day you're going to run into a brick wall.

I always think something to look forward to is usually better than the thing itself. At least looking forward to something gives you the will to live.

Attitude" was the word they used for someone who knew what they liked.

Being places alone makes you think. Being there with someone makes you hounded by details, like what time the other person wants to leave; details that drain energy when you are trying to discover the core of an event. Being there with William put a damper on glorious possibilities. But I'd given up on those, which was why, I suppose, I went so many places with William.

The feeling of glamour just wasn't in the air.

God, what a night. I was so glad you were home, standing up in all that wind while everyone else was blowing across the streets like tumbleweeds. I wonder if you wish you hadn't been there, with the future looming up in such utter chaos before us. And meanwhile, the night was old and you were beautiful.

And besides, when a story ended, audiences wanted a fixed place—a forever—seduced and abandoned or happily ever after, not off into the night juggling oranges

Most addicts kill themselves by just trying to get some sleep.

It wasn't the way he looked that made him impossible. It was what he said. It was his sense of humor. He would not resist a pun. And any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me.