76 Quotes by Eve Babitz

Derek Taylor was where all the razz-ma-tazz and class sprang from; the Beatles were just charming, rich young men.

She figured that any day now she was going to start feeling the simple composure of normalcy that Jane Austen’s heroines always sought to maintain, the state described in those days as “countenance,” and later as “being cool.

It’s only temporary: you either die, or get better. – Something we used to say about life in general, feeling sophisticated and amusing in bars, back in the days when we thought how you behaved was the fault of other people.

There is no precedent for women getting their own “everything” and learning that it’s not the answer.

People go through life eating lamb chops and breaking their mother’s hearts.

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?

She discovered what most writers insist is true nowadays, which is that they can only write for three hours a day at the most, so what else is there to do but drink?

Also they have this nervous feeling that anyone with tits like that must be vulgar. Or insensitive. There I sit, reading my Proust and minding my p’s and q’s and keeping up with current oddities – no slouch more or less – and I see them shrink from my gaze as though I were a tramp.

She was America-for-spacious-skies, the reason our boys died gladly in the war.