Eve Babitz

“I was in love with Paul Butterfield.”

“By 1976, I was, like, Gonesville. I practically lived at the Troubador for several years. When Bette Midler was there for six weeks, I went every day for both shows. I sat there mesmerized. The only person who went as much as I did was Cher.”

“I've been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I've loved and the ideas I've embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand it.”

“I knew just by reading this guy, Nathanael West, that he was probably one of those icky East Coast guys with glasses who got mad because when he came to L.A., all those starlets preferred producers or cowboys to him.”

“I wasn't as used to the new dumb questions, so when men I had once thought of as wise daddies now asked me 'How do you write?' I did not try and spill red wine in their suede pants. I would just smile and say, 'On a typewriter in the mornings when there's nothing else to do.'”

“Musicians are impossible.”

“People with brains went to New York, and people with faces came West.”

“I posed as an album-cover designer and photographer... That I today have some album covers and photographs to show for myself is a monument to the attention-to-detail of my disguise.”

“The only reason anything was off-white at the Chateau was because it had once been just plain white.”

“I'm a mermaid now, half my body.”

“I was sure that somewhere a grandiose carnival was going on in the sky, and I was missing it.”

“I looked like Brigitte Bardot, and I was Stravinsky's goddaughter.”

“I like handsome-devil artists the best.”

“'Dirty Dancing' is one of my favorite movies, and I was in love with Patrick Swayze for years, but I tried to stay out of his way and never to meet him because I knew if I did, he'd want to talk about yogurt or some weird dietary restriction or something.”

“When I promise I'll do something, I do it. At least since I got sober.”

“Everybody steals my lines.”

“I've often noticed that there is a moment when a man develops enough confidence and ease in a relationship to bore you to death. Sometimes one hardly even notices it's happened, that moment, until some careless remark arouses one's suspicions.”

“For the first six months, all whe wanted was honest labor, finely crafted novels, and surf.”

“From earliest childhood, I have rejoiced over the Santa Ana winds. I know those winds the way the Eskimos know their snows.”

“I met Harrison Ford at Barney's Beanery. And I met Steve Martin at the bar at the Troubador. He said he wanted to be a stand-up comic. I thought that was the worst idea because he was so square, so Orange County.”