Eve Babitz Quotes

You know, when you come to think about it, it's a wonder women have anything to do with men at all, and no surprise that men have devised all kinds of schemes to bind women to them, like not giving them any money. If you had your choice of sleeping with a beautiful soft creature or a large hard one, which would you pick? I mean, if they both had the same amount of money?

...chivalry was just another nefarious masculine scheme to keep women in their place.

The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden.

. . 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.

They must have begun in life knowing they were going to amount to something.

I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.

She was America-for-spacious-skies, the reason our boys died gladly in the war.

Derek Taylor was where all the razz-ma-tazz and class sprang from; the Beatles were just charming, rich young men.

It's very easy to stand L.A., which is why it's almost inevitable that all sorts of ideas get entertained.

I wouldn't leave L.A. if the whole place tipped over into the ocean,' Mary declared. And indeed, she only left Los Angeles on urgent business. She was too tough and too fragile for anyplace else.

I discovered there was something else I had never considered-Plan C- don't turn to mush, don't leave, stay and resist. Tango's entire point.

[Photographer Julian Wasser] had this great idea that I should play chess naked with Marcel Duchamp and it seem to be such a great idea that it was just like the best idea I'd ever heard in my life. It was like a great idea. I mean, it was - Not only was it vengeance, it was art, and it was, like, a great idea. And even if it didn't get any vengeance, it would still turn out okay with me because, you know, I would be sort of immortalized.

I find myself coming out of the library with all women writers. I keep hoping the library attendant won't notice, but when 8 out of 8 of the books you take out are by women, you try not to look too dykey.

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

I was always much too elated to imagine despair.

The act of waitressing is a solace, it's got everything you could ask for - confusion, panic, humility, and food.

There are only three things to say about cocaine. One, there is no such thing as enough. Two, it will never be as good as the first time. Three, those first two facts constitute a tragedy of expense in ways that can't be experienced unless you've had cocaine ... Your brain will settle into a puddle around your sinuses and you will die.

I felt luxuriously involved in an unsolvable mystery, my favorite way to feel.

Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.

It was all balance. But then, she already knew that from surfing.

She figured that any day now she was going to start feeling the simple composure of normalcy that Jane Austen's heroines always sought to maintain, the state described in those days as "countenance," and later as "being cool.

It's the frames which make some things important and some things forgotten. It's all only frames from which the content rises.

One afternoon I was sitting on a veranda at a party with about six women and the information that was exchanged, commonly called gossip, was enough to run the world for months. Suddenly a hush fell over the women and I looked around and there was a man. The women slid masks over their faces, the subject changed, the man said, "What are all you girls doing out here? Come in and join the party." And the summit conference was over.

Virginia Woolf said that people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip, so if you're reading this at all then you might as well read my private asides written so he'll read it. I have to be extremely funny and wonderful around him just to get his attention at all and it's a shame to let it all go for one person.