Dan Fante Quotes

Wilson smiled, knowing that not talking was one of her best features.

My secret weapon is my anger. That's what stimulates me as an artist. I want change. I want it yesterday. I'm pissed off at America. Society. American movies. American TV. American culture. American politicians. Capitalism. [...] Impatience and rage are always just beneath the surface for me.

We're fat, we're greedy, and we don't give a shit. Our religion is TV. Our saviour is Bill Gates. We've learned our lessons well. We know how to put number one first.

From the bookcase behind his writing table, I pulled down a copy of Hunger by Knut Hamsun. This book, my father used to say, caused him to become a writer. I held it in my hand and flipped through the old pages.

I felt the question was stupid so I didn't answer.

The problem that your type has is that you don't listen and you keep insisting on operating by your own rules. Only you push and shove and wiggle and spit and outsmart everybody. You're a lover of man and beast alike, as long as you're getting your way. With people like you, Bruno, pain is the only teacher. Failure. No one can tell you that you're about to put your hand in a buzz saw. But it's only when you, yourself, see fingertips flying past your eyes, and watch your arm being chopped into a bloody stump that you'll be able to stop. You hit all walls at full speed. That's what I mean by high maintenance.

More and more my mind shut down behind the wine . . . until I was conscious of just sections of time. Bits and pieces of grey awareness. Then . . . v-e-r-y-s-o-o-n it was all completely dark.

SEA-MATION is a service I'd see advertised all the time. The gimmick is cremation plus burial at sea. All in one: SEA-MATION. A fellow with a grey toupee gives the pitch while they continue flashing the 800 phone number of the company on the bottom of the screen. SEA-MATION had a sale going, a 'pre-need special.' Ordering now saved you ninety-nine ninety-five. One week only.

My father was teaching me his trade. I was his son and he was showing me how to write the way his own father from Torricella Peligna had shown him, as a boy, how to work a wall of stone or lay a row of brick. I was learning how to build books. Watching a master at work. Those would be the most important days of my life.

My problem is that I hold grudges. If you and I have had an argument and I've come out second or you are my boss and you've abused your authority in some way, I will wait, allow the annoyance to fester, even pretend that everything is okay between us, then, with what normally to others would seem like a minimum provocation, without notice, I will overreact and behave like a cornered snake. It's a bad personality flaw and I've had to pay the tab for it again and again.

What he didn't know is that I know desperate too and crazy and what emptiness and alones and rage can do to you when you've got nothing but your own pain in your pockets and your home is a busted-out 1978 Pontiac stalled in an alley in West L.A. and the voice in your mind is carving you up and killing more of you off each day

What amused him most was another human's discomfort.

In a few hours it would be midnight and I would have gone a full day on my own without a drink. And one day could mean two. If I stayed off the booze, I knew I'd be able to write again. I started the Dart and headed north up the Coast Highway. There was a blueness to the ocean I had never noticed before.