Quotes from Eve Babitz

Work and love—the two best things—flourish in studios. It's when you have to go outside and define everything that they often disappear.

At least the Château Marmont kept looking as if when you entered a room you might be in Tangiers when you left. But then, my friends are the type who love Tangiers, and I've always been afraid if I went to the actual place, I'd never come back.

The word "escape" had blown out the glow: it was so boring of these American women to imagine they were worth pursuing.

She could get published in a sound journal that meant business and didn't publish fly-by-nights. She was twenty-eight. It was time for her to O.D., not get published.

Oh, come on," he said finally, a secret pleased look just beneath the surface of his face, "you love it here. Admit it.

Also they have this nervous feeling that anyone with tits like that must be vulgar. Or insensitive. There I sit, reading my Proust and minding my p's and q's and keeping up with current oddities—no slouch more or less—and I see them shrink from my gaze as though I were a tramp.

That always seemed like the whole thing; they'll let you have stories, but you can't ever think in a certain way. There are no spaces between the words, it's one of the charms of the place. Certain things don't have to be thought about carefully because you're always being pushed from behind. It's like a tunnel where there's no sky.

New York has a kind of push," he argues further. "I know. You never have time to think. It's one of its charms." "Yeah, it is.

After all, historically it's always been dreadful for women, and the logic given them was "It's going to be dreadful so you may as well learn to enjoy it." I

Once when I testified before a Senate Committee about LSD, Bobby Kennedy asked me how many people I knew smoked marijuana. Brazenly I announced, "Everyone I know smokes marijuana except my grandmother.

It's when you have to go outside and define everything that they often disappear. In

Of the nine million Harlequin Romance and Silhouette Ecstasy books for women today, sold and read by the ton, no hero appears whose primary quality isn't arrogance. If any man appears at first helpful, cheerful, and polite, he's the villain. The man who at first appears hopelessly mean and insensitive, he's the hero. It's cornography. Margaret Mitchell's inspiration for Rhett Butler was Valentino in that tango. It's a twentieth-century malaise.

Having spent the day defending myself from the slings and arrows of outrageous truck drivers and busboys, I am sometimes ill-equipped to suddenly assume an air of sensitive melancholy

I dressed next to her in gym (on my other side was this nice girl named Cathy whose only flaw was that she was kind of gullible and that kept me from being too shocked when I saw her in Life magazine crouched under a rock as one of the "Manson Family" and called Gypsy).

They've forgotten about beds, and I understand, because once you set sail on a movie, you are out of touch with ordinary land. Movie-makers between movies seem like you and me; they go to parties, they shop, they swim. But they're just treading water, waiting for another injection, another ship to come take them away in film. And money has nothing to do with it. "Gabrielle

There's no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer.

It wasn't that I actually was fat or anything, it was just that I wasn't supposed to be eating all that candy—it showed. It showed at the beach. It showed in "tight" skirts. It showed in gym. But I was never dumb enough to think I was Fat; because I wasn't, I just wasn't perfect. And I have never liked perfect things, they give me the creeps.

Robert said, "How can you waste your time on something that won't make money?" "Didn't you used to write plays?" I asked.

I wonder if I'll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything... are all my occasional romances to fall to the ground after a month or so, like the jacaranda flowers?

Sunrise swept out to sea, a sea of her own tears. "Hey," Jacaranda said, acting as though it were "only a movie," a sound in her voice of carefree girlish abandon

Although I don't ever think I'll get enough mangoes in my life, eating one in the hot rain is one of the more perfect divine interventions. Mangoes will make you forget anything but mangoes.

watching their smoke lured out the window by the sun.

Sunrise, it was revealed, could learn any song after hearing it once. In fact, she could just sort of imagine how a song would go. It was shocking each time she was right; it was shocking in the way that certain musicians just plunk out the melodies, chords, and all, and can't even read music, never "learned," just know.

I got jealous. I thought you liked her better." "I wish you didn't feel that way," he'd say, often, in the beginning. He hasn't said it to me lately; it's been nearly a year since his smiling made suicide seem perfectly sensible.