Fante Quotes

#1. From a literary standpoint, I've been loving Raymond Carver's short stories, William Carlos Williams' poems, Richard Siken's 'Crush', John Fante, and Jim Harrison's book of ghazals. I love film and photography too, so many of my songs are very image rich from those influences.

Greta Salpeter

#2. I discovered John Fante when I was 17 years old - strangely, not through Charles Bukowski, but through William Saroyan, who was his drinking buddy.

Jonathan Evison

#3. 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

#4. She continued. "I love my people, James," she said, and his name on her tongue was indescribably sweet. "I am proud to be Asante, as I am sure you are proud to be Fante, but after I lost my brothers, I decided that as for me, Akosua, I will be my own nation.

Yaa Gyasi

#5. The Church must go, it is the haven of the booboisie, of boobs and bounders and all brummagem mountebanks.

John Fante

#6. 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

#7. Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit.

John Fante

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. I was a degenerate, with an insatiable capacity for perversion. Incapable of change. I could do anything except not drink.

Dan Fante

#15. 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

#16. What I want to say here is that there is a place beyond control and beyond concern that people can go, where the values and the needs of everyday life change completely. Where what matters is moment-to-moment survival to avoid mind pain.

Dan Fante

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. Come on! Who wants to fight me?

John Fante

#20. Jesus, these Protestants! In my church we didn't sing cheap hymns. With us it was Handel and Palestrina.

John Fante

#21. I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed.

John Fante

#22. 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

#23. We're fat, we're greedy, and we don't give a shit. Our religion is TV. Our saviour is Bill Gates. We've learned our lessons well. We know how to put number one first.

Dan Fante

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?

John Fante

#27. With my last nickel I went there for a cup of coffee.

John Fante

#28. Her hair spilled over the pillow like a bottle of overturned ink.

John Fante

#29. 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

#30. I think my strength comes from being an insane drunk. Near death. Wanting death like a lover every day for years. My talent comes from madness - having survived madness.

Dan Fante

#31. We were two miles from Bunker Hill, in the east part of town, in the section of factories and breweries. She

John Fante

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. I was satisfied that I had done my best. She was insane.

John Fante

#38. Speak to me, Rosa. Look this way just once, over here Rosa, where I am watching.

John Fante

#39. 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

#40. no wonder i let queers suck my cock

Dan Fante

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. Careful, Arturo Bandini: don't strain your eyesight, remember what happened to Tarkington, remember what happened to James Joyce.

John Fante

#44. 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

#45. Nor did he give a damn for the world either, or the universe, or heaven or hell. But he liked women.

John Fante

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.

John Fante

#49. 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

#50. I didn't ask any questions. Everything I wanted to know was written in tortured phrases across the desolation of her face.

John Fante

#51. ...man can survive ...he can kill and be twisted and broken and desperate and insane and fuck barnyard pets in the dark and wear a dress if he chooses, and hate and destroy everything that's beautiful, and wish for death for himself and others with every breath, and still be a perfect child of God.

Dan Fante

#52. 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

#53. When stuck, hit the road.

John Fante

#54. the world was so big, so full of things I could master.

John Fante

#55. Bandini looked at a patch of blue in the east.
'Pretty soon we'll have spring', he said.
'We sure will!

John Fante