Lucky’s Reviews > Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. > Status Update

My sister is now working on the question "How do you love someone and not take them personally; not care?" I told her that when she figured out the answer to tell me, and I promised not to tell anyone.

Since I've started carrying a book everywhere, even to something like the Academy Awards, I've had a much easier time of it, and the bitterness that shortens your life has been headed off at the pass by the wonderful Paperback. Light, fitting easily into most purses, the humble paperback has saved a lot of relationships for me that would have ended in bloodshed.

It must have been his basic mediocre brain that drew people to him; he was like an animal who's too much of an animal to comprehend the inevitability of his own death, and that kind of person is always a comfort.

Designers don't live in apartments like most people, or studios like artists; they live in "spaces." "How do you like my space?" they ask, showing you some inconceivable, uncozy, anti-Dickens ode to white, chrome, and inch-thick glass.
"But where do you sleep?" I wonder, nervous.
"There's a space up those stairs," I'm told.

There is something fascinating about a person's face when they're not falling apart because of their imperfections and self-loathing Pleasure is a lure. When you're smiling, the whole world would rather smile with you and have another watercress sandwich than ponder the universe with an ex-Beatle.

The funny thing was that I'd always believed that sex masterpieces were the best kind. Better than Bach, the Empire State Building, or Marcel Proust. I believe that most people put ninety-eight percent of all their creative energy into trying to stage marvelous love scenes.

"I wonder," I said to my mother, "if I’ll ever get married."
"Well, if you do," she said, "marry someone you don't mind."

A long time ago my mother and I were driving to a wedding. I had been engaged to both the groom and the best man at one time or another. I'd broken off with both of those guys because I was impatient with ordinary sunsets; I was sure that somewhere a grandiose carnival was going on in the sky and I was missing it.

I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.

There’s no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were. Which is only a darker version of the Hollywood "everything" in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with.