Quotes from Eve Babitz

It's horrible when someone dumps you, especially when he's not your type.

At that time, Haily, like the eighties to come, believed in too much, and like most of those women who think you can't have big enough closets, she still didn't look that great. Or at least she never looked kind and beautiful like Kate. She looked mean and stylish, as if she were supposed to be beautiful and you should take her word for it. From afar, she looked a lot better than close up. Sort of like America

where I grew up we believed there was such a thing as selling out and that those interested in the arts shouldn't do it.

Suddenly our particular trance turned into a monarch butterfly and everybody knew just how to make it look real. Though irrevocable loss did cling since it was only a movie.

Mary had been the object of a war between ordinary solid American values and Hollywood, where even money is lost in the shuffle among the hard floors and 5:00 a.m. wardrobe calls of an invisible city named for a plant that never existed, named by a clan that waits for the next movie to sail away on.

We were always being taken to rehearsals when we were little and it is probably because of that that I like rehearsals better than concerts. There is something about listening to a group of people try over and over to get it right and at last do that provides a tension of drama you don't get when they're all dressed up giving a concert.

What shall we drink?" she asked, when we sat down in the restaurant. We drank the same thing when we were together for some reason, maybe symmetry.

Bakersfield, after all, is where Merle Haggard lives; they call it Nashville West.)

her third day in New York, Jacaranda looked at herself in the Essex mirror and thought she looked ten years younger than the forty she'd looked in La Jolla. By the fourth day she looked twenty-five years old, and by the end of a week she looked what her mother, when she saw her, referred to as "your age, dear, eighteen.

In Hollywood, if you can't have a father in the Industry, the least you can have is a great-aunt.)

dancing in various strangely old-fashioned places around LA., especially one place that is now gone, called the Black Forest, where a German band played, and tall USC alumni of German descent did gorgeous old waltzes.

I love hordes. They screen out free choice; you're free at last: stuck. Our

Women are prepared to suffer for love; it's written into their birth certificates.

Yeah?" Janet said, lighting a Marlboro. Janet looked gorgeous at Elaine's, it was exactly the right light for her;

Janis Joplin was always wondering when her prince would come, and the wait was such a bore that she purchased total surcease on the smooth, blank, clear, smiling lake of heroin. A famous friend of the famous

My claustrophobia from San Francisco begins to vanish—that cheerful shipshape vitality of the north violates my spirit and I long for vast sprawls, smog, and luke nights: L.A. It is where I work best, where I can live, oblivious to physical reality.

I've been in fast company, as they call it

He had black curly hair and was plainly a genius

Honey, don't ever try to figure out what's going on between two people.

Everyone knew the way to dance was like black people did and they all danced that way.

I'm dying and use words like gaunt . When I weigh 125, which is almost but not quite what Vogue might be able to deal with, I look as old as Jeanne Moreau when she's just murdered someone.

When I weigh 130, my friends think I'm dying and use words like gaunt . When I weight 125, which is almost but not quite what Vogue might be able to deal with, I look as old as Jeanne Moreau when she's just murdered someone.

In Los Angeles, the supermarkets all have kosher sections, health food sections, Mexican and Thai shelves. These packages of foreign hungers mirror the city with their bilingual instructions.

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." He can forgive New York's shortcomings and think of them as charms, but he cannot forgive L.A. for the spaces between the words, the blandness and the complete absence of push.