I found when I followed the driveway around to the back that behind its imposing front it was just another tract house, as if the architect had tried to combine a southern plantation mansion with...

I like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of power, I guess, to take my life in my hands and know damn well I’m not going to lose...

It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on...

Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.

She didn’t look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn’t quite made the grade down south, or a very successful amateur tart on the verge of turning pro....

In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.

Never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.

There’s nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure

I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.

Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born.

Losing Hidden Valley would be not a good thing. No question he’s in a difficult position, certainly. We have an opportunity to address that situation through the regional master plan.

The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.

Property transactions were down in the Highlands, but they were also down across the state.

I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.

Money costs too much

No one looks at the mountains. But they were there, making them all look silly.

Money costs too much.

On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up...

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man.

The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution.

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.