1) "I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone's press agent. (This precludes doing pieces on most actors, a bonus in itself.) I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

2) "The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.
It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves 'hippies.' When I first went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967 I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around awhile, and made a few friends."

3) "Why do I keep a notebook at all? [...] The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."

4) "The oral history of Los Angeles is written in piano bars. 'Moon River,' the piano player always plays, and 'Mountain Greenery.' 'There's a Small Hotel' and 'This Is Not the First Time.' People talk to each other, tell each other about their first wives and last husbands. 'Stay funny,' they tell each other, and 'This is to die over.' A construction man talks to an unemployed screenwriter who is celebrating, alone, his tenth wedding anniversary. The construction man is on a job in Montecito: 'Up in Montecito,' he says, 'they got one square mile with 135 millionaires.'
'Putrescence,' the writer says.
'That's all you got to say about it?'
'Don't read me wrong, I think Santa Barbara's one of the most---Christ, the most---beautiful places in the world, but it's a beautiful place that contains a...putrescence. They just live on their putrescent millions.'
'So give me putrescent.'
'No, no,' the writer says. 'I just happen to think millionaires have some sort of lacking in their...in their elasticity.'
A drunk requests 'The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.' The piano player says he doesn't know it. 'Where'd you learn to play the piano?' the drunk asks. 'I got two degrees,' the piano player says. 'One in musical education.' I go to a coin telephone and call a friend in New York. 'Where are you?' he says. 'In a piano bar in Encino,' I say. 'Why?' he says. 'Why not,' I say.'"