EVE BABITZ

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.'

Everybody steals my lines.

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'm a mermaid now, half my body.

I was in love with Paul Butterfield.

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.

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.

Partner dancing is a cultured act.

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

Musicians are impossible.

'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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I like handsome-devil artists the best.

... 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.

By the time I'd grown up, I naturally supposed that I'd grown up

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

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.

[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.