Top 46 John Fante Quotes
#1. We were two miles from Bunker Hill, in the east part of town, in the section of factories and breweries. She
John Fante
#2. So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your lash-in-the-pen genius, your one story-writer: a thief.
John Fante
#3. Well, this is good for me, this is experience, I am here for a reason, these moments run into pages, the seamy side of life.
John Fante
#4. I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living
John Fante
#5. Arturo Bandini: -What does happiness mean to you Camilla?
Camilla: -That you can fall in love with whoever you want to,
and not feel ashamed of it.
John Fante
#6. I looked at the faces around me and I knew mine was like theirs. Faces with the blood drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colours draining fast. I had to get away from that town.
John Fante
#7. I was satisfied that I had done my best. She was insane.
John Fante
#8. Speak to me, Rosa. Look this way just once, over here Rosa, where I am watching.
John Fante
#9. Oh how I hate you, you filthy. But you're cleaner than me, because you've got no mind to sell, just that poor flesh.
John Fante
#10. My dear girl. I am equally fond of man and beast alike. There is not the slightest drop of enmity in my system.
John Fante
#11. Like my father, I am very impatient. I have a strong bullshit detector. I may finish one book in twenty that I have started.
John Fante
#12. We talked, she and I. She asked about my work and it was a pretense, she was not interested in my work. And when I answered, it was a pretense. I was not interested in my work either. There was only one thing that interested us, and she knew it. She had made it plain by her coming.
John Fante
#13. Nor did he give a damn for the world either, or the universe, or heaven or hell. But he liked women.
John Fante
#14. Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don't desert me now. I started to write and I wrote:
The time has come, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing-wax
Of cabbages - and kings -
John Fante
#15. Someday, as an exercise, you might ask a writer to give himself the questions he wants to answer. If you really want a writer's opinions, you have to ask for them. What you read might surprise you.
John Fante
#16. You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.
John Fante
#17. I write every morning. Two hours. Then I take a break and become my own secretary for a few hours. If I am "hot" I write in the afternoon and at night too.
John Fante
#18. I didn't ask any questions. Everything I wanted to know was written in tortured phrases across the desolation of her face.
John Fante
#19. Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets, I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen, as sure as there's a God in heaven.
John Fante
#21. the world was so big, so full of things I could master.
John Fante
#22. Bandini looked at a patch of blue in the east.
'Pretty soon we'll have spring', he said.
'We sure will!
John Fante
#23. Careful, Arturo Bandini: don't strain your eyesight, remember what happened to Tarkington, remember what happened to James Joyce.
John Fante
#24. Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths I once believed and now they were beliefs I felt were myths.
John Fante
#25. I told him, "The writing instinct has always lain dormant in me. Now it is in the process of metamorphosis. The era of transition has passed. I am on the threshold of expression."
He said, "Balls.
John Fante
#26. If there is work there is warmth, that when a man has freedom of movement it is enough, for then his blood is hot too
John Fante
#27. Look at the people who review. Look at their commitment to being "right" and "safe". If I had listened to my critics I would have given up years ago.
John Fante
#28. Murderer or bartender or writer, it didn't matter: his fate was the common fate of all, his finish my finish; and here tonight in this city of darkened windows were other millions like him and like me: as indistinguishable as dying blades of grass. Living was hard enough. Dying was a supreme task.
John Fante
#29. There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness.
John Fante
#30. The bible is a source of great inspiration to me. It is a textbook of metaphysics. Within the bible are keys to personal growth, and lessons in personal actualization. The bible is a spiritual masterpiece.
John Fante
#31. I tell you I always tip. It's a matter of principle with me. I'm like Hemingway. I always do it second-nature.
John Fante
#32. When I go into a bookstore I always look for books by John Fante. If they are out-of-stock on one of his titles, I tell the clerk to order what is missing. I do it because I want people to read my father's work.
John Fante
#33. Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit.
John Fante
#34. The Church must go, it is the haven of the booboisie, of boobs and bounders and all brummagem mountebanks.
John Fante
#35. I was twenty then. What the hell, I used to say, take your time, Bandini. You got ten years to write a book, so take it easy, get out and learn about life, walk the streets. That's your trouble: your ignorance of life.
John Fante
#37. Jesus, these Protestants! In my church we didn't sing cheap hymns. With us it was Handel and Palestrina.
John Fante
#38. I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed.
John Fante
#39. So fuck you, Los Angeles, fuck your palm trees, and your highassed women, and your fancy streets, for I am going home, back to Colorado, back to the best damned town in the USA - Boulder, Colorado.
John Fante
#40. Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town!
John Fante
#41. I tossed my shoulders and swaggered away, whistling with pleasure. In the gutter I saw a long cigaret butt. I picked it up without shame, lit it as I stood with one foot in the gutter, puffed it and exhaled toward the stars. I was an American, and goddamn proud of it.
John Fante
#42. Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?
John Fante
#43. With my last nickel I went there for a cup of coffee.
John Fante
#44. Her hair spilled over the pillow like a bottle of overturned ink.
John Fante
#45. all of us were here for a little while, and then we were somewhere else; we were not alive at all; we approached living, but we never achieved it. We are going to die. Everybody was going to die.
John Fante
#46. Ask the dust on the road! Ask the Joshua trees standing alone where the Mojave begins. Ask them about Camilla Lopez, and they will whisper her name.
John Fante
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