133 Quotes by Steve Erickson

L.A. streets aren't just paved real estate but a cosmology, a manifestation of the city's sensibility.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

Ironically, if only because over the years I've known so many - from college deans to studio executives to European expats - who come to Los Angeles aspiring to nothing other than living in Topanga, I wound up there by accident.

I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.

I rode the buses in L.A. until I was in my early 30s, and there's something about driving or riding through L.A. after sundown, when the Utopian city goes into hiding and another city comes out, more Doors and less Byrds.

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.

Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison - each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all.

Overall I think I'm playing a lot better. I've worked a lot more this year and I'm more confident. I'm mentally stronger.

Representing not just the resurrection of a career, 1953 marked 37-year-old Frank Sinatra's creative emergence as the best singer of his century.