“If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature. There is a peculiar sense in which this city existing mainly on film and tape is our national capital, alas, and not just the capital of California. It's the place where our children learn how and what to dream and where everything happens just before, or just after, it happens to us.”

“If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature. There is a peculiar sense in which this city existing mainly on film and tape is our national capital, alas, and not just the capital of California. It's the place where our children learn how and what to dream and where everything happens just before, or just after, it happens to us.”

“There's nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.”

“The walls of books around him dense with the past formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”

“On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.”

“Flames entered the room like dancers, orange-colored and whirring.”

“The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.”

“The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”

“He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man.”

“In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.”

“Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.”

“The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution.”