Always Crashing in the Same Car Quotes

“Life itself is chaos, the artist’s life is often one that tends to give that chaos its full extension.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“for someone who knew, from sea to shining sea, exactly what the trouble is with our republic—he found out the hard way—he did the astounding in lieu of the impossible. He became the mountain, instead.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“This is the trouble with those who show you how to live, unfortunately. They don’t necessarily know how to do it themselves.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“There, too, the books that seemed to be on every American middlebrow, middle-class, middle-everything shelf in those years: Updike’s Couples and Judy Blume’s Wifey, Oriana Fallaci and Gay Talese, Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Leonard Michaels.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“Let me just tell you one more time how it is; let me finally make myself, again, clear—and also entirely, inescapably useless.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“This year I’ve come again to grief upon the experienced facts of the external world and found them indistinguishable from the dark play within the mind.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“There is no spouse or partner (for now), and no children—that ship has likely sailed—but there is the joy of a mind at play. Isn’t that enough?”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“There isn’t a writer alive who isn’t acutely aware of the time, who isn’t losing it—and finding it—constantly.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“(“I find here again, as with my writing, I don’t want to do the work that reveals me to myself”),”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“I have been so long discouraged in love, that I wonder if I am insensible to it. I am often with someone who loves me, but whom I don’t love except in an affectionate companionable way . . . I become tired, and my thoughts drift . . . I become bored with them as I become bored with myself.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“All time is truly lost and gone/which is not spent in serving love.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“I loved my daughter with everything I had. I loved her with an intensity that shocked me, insofar as no actual presence in my life had ever fully prepared me for it.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“Hollywood is a tesseract, in which time and space are continually folding in upon themselves.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“Mourning an abusive parent is difficult, as we all know,”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“They say you’re supposed to work out all your neuroses in your first marriage, so that you’ll be marvelous in your second marriage,” she said.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“Because empathy is a product of lack, of yearning and suffering and absence, and of the recognition that you don’t, in fact, “deserve” any better than anyone else does, no matter what you’ve done or won or been awarded.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“Success makes nobody kinder.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“Me? I felt like I was going to throw up just because the bill had arrived at a Santa Monica sushi restaurant.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“That guy . . . d’you think he’s ever smoked weed? Has he ever seen a band that wasn’t playing at the Coliseum? Was he born in a Lacoste diaper?”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“In this case, he thought of Burt Lancaster, who had the perfect background: he was bookish, literate.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“David and Lisa was, to the surprise of nearly everybody, a hit. Like Cassavetes’s film, it premiered at Venice, and it won an award for Best First Work.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“She and her husband had two children, but both were college-age now. Did she need to continue this masquerade?”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“(didn’t all white suburban men, at least the kind who drove sports cars and who took up running to combat their middle-aged paunches, the hard-charging coastal types, look a bit like Balzac in the seventies?).”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“how the writer fell in love with an animated, charming, overweight man who looked like Balzac (“with his plumped-out cheeks and rolls of chin and shaggy hair and beard”), who ate Fig Newtons in bed even as he swore he would never leave her.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“What better way to shake off one’s own sense of incompetence and despair than by reading about the ennui and distress of the previous generation? I tucked the book under my arm, then went to ring it up.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“Writers are vacillators, living and dying—and, y’know, both, often enough, at the same time—on the strength of their capacity for indecision.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“Los Angeles might be a place for those who ask no questions to thrive. In this it is like every other place.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

“Los Angeles might be a place for those who ask no questions to thrive. In this it is like every other place. But for those who wonder, who voiced even the most basic existential concerns—what the fuck am I doing here? And why?—this city is a sticky wicket.”
― Matthew Specktor, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California