“Fiction is history that didn’t happen and history is fiction that did.”

She had lost fifteen pounds over this—which I always envied in a person, someone who got a broken heart and lost weight instead of mainlining See’s semisweet Bordeaux.

(Eve’s lack of political consciousness is hard to read in 2018 and no doubt contributed to the general opinion that she was a “light” writer),

(She knows having character is out of fashion, but she attempts to make it up to you by picking people up at the airport, apologizing all the while.)

He’s the only person I know who still considers swimming in the Pacific Ocean at Venice Beach fun. I haven’t been swimming in that water since my friend Bob-the-Surfer came down with the same leukemia a group of lifeguards from that area died of. The bay we have here that looks so beautiful is a deadly black swan after all.

au courant

The idea of middle age—never mind old age, God forbid one hundred years!—is the violent opposite of everything Hollywood is based upon, which, as anyone can see, is and has always been beauty: youthful, feminine, saintly beauty like Mary Pickford, or disillusioned, lost beauty like Greta Garbo; beauty without a whisper of fading, sagging, or wrinkl

once I began to make sure only sweetness and light got a foot in the door, men who were horrible ceased to thrill me as they once had,

This wasn’t like designing an album cover and having someone in the group decide he hated it, and you’d have to do it again and again. This wasn’t like being assigned an illustration, and then they never paid you until you threatened fourteen times to kill yourself.