Todd > Todd's Quotes

“Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.”
― James Crumley

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“Lady bartenders live a tougher life than anybody knows. -- Dancing Bear”
― James Crumley

“...the sun rose each morning to stare into my face with the blank but touching gaze of a lovely retarded child.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“I had done either too much coke or too little, a constant problem in my life.”
― James Crumley, Dancing Bear

“An old drinking buddy of mine had come home from a two-week binge with a rose tattooed on his arm. Around the blossom was written Fuck ‘em all/and sleep till noon. His wife made him have it surgically removed, but she hated the scar even more. Every time he touched it, he grinned. Some years later she tried to remove the grin with a wine bottle, but she only knocked out a couple of teeth, which made the grin even more like a sneer. The part that I don’t understand, though, is that they are still married. He is still grinning and she is still hating it.”
― James Crumley

“I knew the men were probably terrible people who whistled at pretty girls, treated their wives like servants, and voted for Nixon every chance they got, but as far as I was concerned, they beat the hell out of a Volvo-load of liberals for hard work and good times.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“Maybe I will go to Paris.
Who knows? But I’ll sure as hell never
Go back to Texas again”
― James Crumley

“Stories are like snapshots, pictures snatched out of time, with clean hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“I have learned some things. Modern life is warfare without end: take no prisoners, leave no wounded, eat the dead--that's environmentally sound.”
― James Crumley, Dancing Bear

“I chuckled like Aldo Ray. If I had to endure his l'homme du monde act, he had to suffer my jaded alcoholic private eye.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“She had done worse, all right, lots worse. She had been a thief, a pimp, a blackmailer, a junkie, a liar and a cheat. She had pretended to love men she had despised. She had done it all, and none of it had worked. Every time she got into a place where she might have had a chance, something inside her had fired up and she ruined her chances. Always…Her whole life was a clutter of three-day jobs, punctured ambitions and drug-deadened hangovers.
'Oh Lindy,' she cried out. 'Help me! Help me!' She clenched her pillow and sobbed. It had been more than twenty years since she had shed any tears for anybody. Now these tears were for herself.”
― Don Carpenter, The True Life Story of Jody McKeegan

“I consider my work optimistic in that the people, during the period I’m writing about them, are experiencing intense emotion. It is my belief that this is all there is to it.”
― Don Carpenter

“How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn't anybody's fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.

All right. Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change. Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it. It would be easier to believe in God. Then you could wake up and yawn and stretch and grin at a world that was put together on a plan of mercy and death, punishment for evil, joy for good, and if the game was crazy at least it had rules. But that didn't make sense. It had never made any sense. The trouble was, now that he was not asleep and not awake, what he saw and heard didn't make sense either.

Mishmash, he thought. You know enough to know how you feel is senseless, but you don't know enough to know why.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“Southern California is the land of crazy crimes.”
― Don Carpenter, From a Distant Place

“All night long, in his cell, he burned with hatred. It did not matter what he thought, it was how he felt; and alone in the darkness of his cell, with the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“They grew some of their own vegetables, but Semple was never in eighteen years allowed out into the truck gardens. Instead, he watched out the north window of the violent ward through the thick cyclone mesh and felt himself out there, going down the rows of corn, cutting suckers or tugging up the dark-leafed weeds, feeling the strain low in his back and hearing the dry rustle of stalks in the July wind; the sun reddening his neck and rills of sweat cutting lines through the dust on his cheeks; bent over, his hands green stained and sore, blistered and cut from the weeds and the sharp-edged corn plant leaves; feet hot and swollen in state-issue shoes cracked and dirty; but smelling it, the corn, the dirt, the hand-mashed weeds, the sticky white milk gumming and clotting his fingers; the smell on cloudy days when everything was heavy with the expectancy of rain and sullen with the summer heat, the smell denser then, making him straighten up, his nose high, waiting for it, for something, a man in silhouette against the background of corn, like all the other men in cornfields and gardens and on farms, even the men in cities between the buildings on crowded streets lifting their noses to the heavy clouds and feeling the expectancy of the rain, waiting for the first thick drops to sound against the corn, to strike his face. And then the gallop home through sheets of rain, ducking into doorways, newspapers over heads, laughter coming up out of the heart at this common happening, and men together, in doorways, cafeterias, kitchens, barns, tractor sheds, or even in the lee of haystacks, looking at each other happily with wet red faces because it was raining hard. Loving it and feeling joy from such a thing. He stood at the window and made it happen, even under a blue sky. And would, early in his eighteen years, turn from the window expressing how he felt in snapping wild-eyed growls and grunts, his hands jerking out of control and his legs falling out from under him, thrashing between the beds, bumping along the floors, his contorted face frightening the other madmen into shrieks and fits and dribbles; happy, so happy inside that it all burst in one white hot uncontrollable surge; the two white-coated attendants coming with their stockings full of powdered soap rolled into fists to club him without marking him, knocking him into enough submission that they could drag him twitching still across the open floor and out to the restraining sheets.”
― Don Carpenter, Blade of Light

“On the drive over, Richards kept marveling at the transforming power of having a felony to commit. His brother looked more like his "normal" self now than at any time in the previous weeks, that is, like a calm, basically reasonable individual, a manly sort of fellow with a certain presence. They talked about Richards' daughter and along other noncontroversial lines. At the airport Richards stood by quietly, if nervously, while Joel transacted his business at the ticket counter, then passed a blue daypack, containing the kilo of cocaine among other things, through the security x-ray. Richards had planned to stop right here--just say good-bye, go outside and start to breathe again--but for some reason he followed his brother through the checkpoint. In silence they proceeded down a broad, sparsely peopled corridor; Joel, with his daypack slung casually over one shoulder, a cigarette occupying his other hand, had given Richards his fiddle case to carry.
Soon they became aware of a disturbance up ahead: a murmurous roar, a sound like water surging around the piles of a pier. The corridor forked and they found themselves in a broad lobby, which was jammed now with Hawaiian travelers, prospective vacationers numbering in the hundreds.

Just as they arrived, a flight attendant, dressed like a renter of cabanas on the beach at Waikiki, picked up a mike and made the final announcement to board. In response to which, those travelers not already on their feet, not already formed in long, snaky line three or four people abreast, arose. The level of hopeful chatter, of sweetly anticipatory human excitement, increased palpably, and Richards, whose response to crowds was generally nervous, self-defensively ironic, instinctively held back. But his brother plunged right in--took up a place at the front of the line, and from this position, with an eager, good-natured expression on his face, surveyed his companions.

Now the line started to move forward quickly. Richards, inching along on a roughly parallel course, two or three feet behind his brother, sought vainly for something comical to say, some reference to sunburns to come, Bermuda shorts, Holiday Inn luaus, and the like.

Joel, beckoning him closer, seemed to want the fiddle case back. But it was Richards himself whom he suddenly clasped, held to his chest with clumsy force. Wordlessly embracing, gasping like a couple of wrestlers, they stumbled together over a short distance full of strangers, and only as the door of the gate approached, the flight attendant holding out a hand for boarding passes, did Richards' brother turn without a word and let him go.”
― Robert Roper, Cuervo Tales

“Then, Patrick, you do feel it too? You do feel ... something? It would be so bleak if you felt nothing. That's what scares women, you know.'

'I do know, and you needn't be scared. I feel something all right.'

'Promise me you'll always treat me as a person.'

'I promise.'

'Promises are so easily given.'

'I'll fulfill this one. Let me show you.'

After a shaky start he was comfortably in the swing of it, having recognised he was on familiar ground after all. Experience had brought him to see that this kind of thing was nothing more than the levying of cock-tax, was reasonable and normal, in fact, even though some other parts of experience strongly suggested that what he had shelled out so far was only a down payment.”
― Kingsley Amis, Difficulties With Girls

“Kingsley could ‘do’ the sound of a brass band approaching on a foggy day. He could become the Metropolitan line train entering Edgware Road station. He could be four wrecked tramps coughing in a bus shelter (this was very demanding and once led to heart palpitations). To create the hiss and crackle of a wartime radio broadcast delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was for him scant problem (a tape of it, indeed, was played at his memorial meeting, where I was hugely honored to be among the speakers). The pièce de résistance, an attempt by British soldiers to start up a frozen two-ton truck on a windy morning ‘somewhere in Germany,’ was for special occasions only. One held one's breath as Kingsley emitted the first screech of the busted starting-key. His only slightly lesser vocal achievement—of a motor-bike yelling in mechanical agony—once caused a man who had just parked his own machine in the street to turn back anxiously and take a look. The old boy's imitation of an angry dog barking the words 'fuck off' was note-perfect.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“After that they had the presents. Those from the guests to the hosts were chiefly a disguised dole: tins or pots of more or less luxurious food, bottles of hard liquor, wide-spectrum gift tokens. Hosts showered guests with diversely unwearable articles of clothing: to Keith from Adela, a striped necktie useful for garroting underbred rivals in his trade; to Tracy from George, a liberation-front lesbian's plastic apron. Under a largely unspoken kind of non-aggression pact, the guests gave one another things like small boxes of chocolates or very large boxes of matches with (say) aerial panoramas of Manhattan on their outsides and containing actual matches each long enough, once struck, to kindle the cigarettes of (say) the entire crew of a fair-sized merchant vessel, given the assembly of that crew in some relatively confined space. Intramural gifts included a bathroom sponge, a set of saucepans, a cushion in a lop-sided cover, a photograph-frame wrought by some vanished hand and with no photographs in it, an embroidered knitting bag. Keith watched carefully what Bernard gave, half expecting a chestnut-coloured wig destined for Adela, or a lavishly-illustrated book on karate for George, but was disappointed, although he savored Bernard's impersonation of a man going all out to hide his despondency as he took the wrappings off present after useless, insultingly cheap, no doubt intended to be facetious, present.”
― Kingsley Amis

“Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.”
― Philip Larkin

“I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.”
― Richard Hugo

“It matters what myths we tell ourselves -- which ideals we choose to honor.”
― Robert Roper, Fatal Mountaineer: The High-Altitude Life and Death of Willi Unsoeld, American Himalayan Legend

“Maybe mountaineering shouldn't be considered heroic at all, since the whole effort is 'useless' and in no way to be compared with sitting down at the wrong lunch counter in the early-sixties South, or going into battle. Nevertheless, situations arise in the useless enterprise of mountaineering that present people with choices, that make emotional and physical demands that few can meet.”
― Robert Roper, Fatal Mountaineer: The High-Altitude Life and Death of Willi Unsoeld, American Himalayan Legend

“Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed.

Write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction.

Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white pages seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page?

Don’t erase. Cross out rapidly and violently, never with slow consideration if you can help it.

Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things.

Play with syntax.

Never want to say anything so strongly that you have to give up the option of finding something better – if you have to say it, you will.

Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong.

If you ask a question, don’t answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. (If you can answer the question, to ask it is to waste time).

Maximum sentence length: seventeen words.

Minimum: One.

Don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don’t love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“Nothing short of physical handicap has ever made anybody turn over a new leaf.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Green Man

“Everybody had been in their twenties then; well, round about thirty. Now, from round about seventy, all those years of maturity or the prime of life or whatever you called it looked like an interval between two bouts of vomiting.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils