Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.

by Eve Babitz

Virginia Woolf said that people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip,

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. It’s very easy to stand L.A., which is why it’s almost inevitable that all sorts of ideas get entertained, to say nothing of lovers.

I didn’t really want to understand, preferring romance to sound reasoning.

Early in life I discovered that the way to approach anything was to be introduced by the right person.

Women are prepared to suffer for love; it’s written into their birth certificates.

I had a collection of lovers to keep me warm and my friendships with women, who always fascinated me by their wit, bravery, and resourcefulness, and who never told you the same story twice. Now, women I didn’t mind.

Being places alone makes you think. Being there with someone makes you hounded by details, like what time the other person wants to leave; details that drain energy when you are trying to discover the core of an event.

You know, when you come to think about it, it’s a wonder women have anything to do with men at all, and no surprise that men have devised all kinds of schemes to bind women to them, like not giving them any money. If you had your choice of sleeping with a beautiful soft creature or a large hard one, which would you pick? I mean, if they both had the same amount of money?

She really does hate parties and crowds and she really does love people one by one in such a way that she’s bound to always be involved in parties and crowds.

Since I’ve started carrying a book everywhere, even to something like the Academy Awards, I’ve had a much easier time of it, and the bitterness that shortens your life has been headed off at the pass by the wonderful Paperback. Light, fitting easily into most purses, the humble paperback has saved a lot of relationships for me that would have ended in bloodshed.

Virginia Woolf can’t be right. Nothing can come of this insane social impasse. I wanted to write a story about Palm Springs that was going to be sexy. I wanted a story with peace in it, for god’s sake. Now I was stuck with this broken romance: Shawn kissing my foot instead of my mouth.

I was a difficult, mean bitch, whose cat, it was rumored, bit men.

But everyone knows that it would have been much better to have been popular in high school when your blood was clean, and pure lust and kisses lasted forever.

That’s the trouble with Hollywood; the things that don’t exist are likely to kill you if you threaten them.

It must have been marvelous when the century was young and things impressed themselves in such blatant vivid brilliance that an approaching fire under a starry sky could illuminate, even to a Crimean actress, this sense of “place”—that there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved.