John Fante Quotes

25 quotes in 609 categories

• Listen closely. There’s a remote possibility that you might learn something: First, I don’t give a damn if my work is commercial or not…I’m the…
• So what’s the use of repentance, and what do you care for goodness, and what if you should die in a quake, so who the…
• So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your lash-in-the-pen genius, your one story-writer: a thief.
• Well, this is good for me, this is experience, I am here for a reason, these moments run into pages, the seamy side of life.
• For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste…
• Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths I once believed…
• We talked, she and I. She asked about my work and it was a pretense, she was not interested in my work. And when I…
• Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty…
• It was a bad one, the Winter of 1933. Wading home that night through flames of snow, my toes burning, my ears on fire, the…
• I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed.
• One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Buker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an…
• Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets, I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room,…
• Oh, God, help me! And I walked faster, my thoughts pursuing me, and I began to run, my frozen shoes squealing like mice, but running…
• Ask the dust on the road! Ask the Joshua trees standing alone where the Mojave begins. Ask them about Camilla Lopez, and they will whisper…
• Ah, Evelyn and Vivian, I love you both, I love you for your sad lives, the empty misery of your coming home at dawn. You…
• You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.
• I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living
• If there is work there is warmth, that when a man has freedom of movement it is enough, for then his blood is hot too
• (...) I let go, crying and unable to stop because God was such a dirty crook, contemptible skunk, that's what he was for doing that…
• Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?

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