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

by Eve Babitz

I read somewhere once that baseball is the game of the Silent Majority.

I’ve often noticed that there is a moment when a man develops enough confidence and ease in a relationship to bore you to death.

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

I heard that when someone once asked William Burroughs why he took heroin he explained simply, “So I can get up and shave in the morning.”

And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you’re talking about.

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?

And any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me.

Just think, if we didn’t have the Santa Anas, how straight we all would be.

I loved it more than anything I’ve ever done before or since because deep down inside every woman is a waitress. The act of waitressing is a solace, it’s got everything you could ask for—confusion, panic, humility, and food.

He makes your faults sound like the inevitable by-products of how brilliant you are.

And for the very first time in my life, I began to deep-down know that even though I was not as thin as George Harrison, it was going to be all right. In fact, it might even be funny.

Arrogance and conceit and remarks like that one are much more fun than starving all the time. Once it is established that you are you and everyone else is merely perfect, ordinarily factory-like perfect . . . you can wreak all the havoc you want.

There is something fascinating about a person’s face when they’re not falling apart because of their imperfections and self-loathing. Pleasure is a lure. When you’re smiling, the whole world would rather smile with you and have another watercress sandwich than ponder the universe with an ex-Beatle.

My mother once said that sex was only good if it was dirty and verboten and I’ve never found anything to disprove this.

There was a point beyond which I would not lie to myself, and pretending I liked football was it.