We drove him home, down Spring Street to First and over the railroad tracks to a black neighborhood that picked up the sounds of the rattling Ford an… - John Fante

Afraid of a woman! Ha, great writer this! How can he write about women, when he's never had a woman? Oh you lousy fake, you phony, no wonder you can't write! No wonder there wasn't a woman in The Little Dog Laughed. No wonder it wasn't a love story, you fool, you dirty little schoolboy.

A cop won't pick you up for vagrancy in Los Angeles if you wear a fancy polo shirt and a pair of sunglasses. But if there is dust on your shoes and that sweater you wear is thick like the sweaters they wear in the snow countries, he'll grab you.

But I was gone, hurrying through the darkness of the vast warehouse, only the echo of [Naylor's] voice reaching me. On the way out I passed through the wet clammy room where they dumped mackerel, from the fishing boats. But tonight there were no mackerel, the season had just ended, and instead there were tuna, the first real tuna I ever saw in such numbers, the floor littered with them, thousands of them scattered over a carpet of dirty ice, their white corpse-like bellies blundering through the semi-darkness. Some of them were still alive. You could hear the sporadic slapping of tails. There in front of me flapped the tail of one who was more alive than dead. I dragged him out of the ice. He was bitter cold and still kicking. I carried him as best I could, dragging him too, until I got him upon the cutting table where the women would dress him tomorrow. He was tremendous, weighing almost a hundred pounds, a monster of a fellow from another world, with great strength still left in his body, and a streak of blood coming from his eye, where he had been hooked. Strong as a man, he hated me and tried to break away from the cutting board. I pulled a gutting knife from the board and held it under his white pulsing gills. "You monster!" I said. "You black monster! Spell Weltanschauung! Go on - spell it!" But he was a fish from another world; he couldn't spell anything. The best he could do was fight for his life, and he was already too tired for that. But even so, he almost got away. I slugged him with my fist. Then I slid the knife under his gill, amused at his helpless gasping, and cut off his head. "When I said spell Weltanschauung, I meant it!" I pushed him back among his comrades upon the ice. "Disobedience means death." There was no response save the faint flapping of a tail somewhere in the blackness. I wiped my hands on a gunny sack and walked into the street toward home.