Money costs too much.

The smile that folded the puffed eyelids and creased the sagging cheeks was fixed and forced. I’d seen such smiles in mortuaries on the false face of death. It reminded me that I was going to grow old and die.

If you can’t pass on a little loving-kindness in this world, you might as well be a gopher in a hole.

I wondered if we were doing him a favor. The Galton household had hot and cold running money piped in from an inexhaustible reservoir. But money was never free. Like any other commodity, it had to be paid for.

At the chinks in the drawn blinds, daylight peered like a spy.

He made a production out of answering her, marching around to her side of the car, carrying his belly in front of him like a gift.

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.

It’s interesting to come back to your childhood home. And creepy, too, like becoming very young and very old, both at the same time. The spirit that haunts the house.’ That was how she looked, I thought, in her archaic long skirt – very young and very old, the granddaughter and the grandmother in one person, slightly schizo. She.

We passed a small-boat harbor, gleaming white on blue, and a long pier draped with fishermen. Everything was as pretty as a postcard. The trouble with you, I said to myself: you’re always turning over the postcards and reading the messages on the underside. Written in invisible ink, in blood, in tears, with a black border around them, with postage due, unsigned, or signed with a thumbprint.

The problem was to love people, try to serve them, without wanting anything from them. I was a long way from solving that one.