Janet Fitch
I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.
I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not. I never get inspired unless I'm already writing.
I write every day, including weekends. For writers, there are no weekends. It's just that your family is around, looking mournful, wondering when you're going to pay attention to them.
A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.
My mother never met a gadget she didn't like. There were tube pans for baking the angel food cakes my father could have after his first heart attack, and Bundt pans and loaf pans and baking pans and grilling pans.
A figure in Los Angeles politics for five decades, my mother nevertheless had had her fill of talking to people by the time she came home at night.
My mother was an enthusiastic chef but wildly disorganized, and often preferred purchasing yet another jar of mace or chili powder rather than having to hunt down its last incarnation.
I'm particularly fond of the Mulholland Fountain, at Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard, when it turns colors at night.
I despise places where you have to have an assigned seat. Makes me feel like I'm at the airport.
My perfect day would be to go on a picnic up Mt. Wilson with Christopher Isherwood, Greta Garbo, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell.
When you have success, people think you know what you're doing, and you start to agree with them, you think you can conquer the world. But you go from grandiosity to panic.
L.A. is such a real, active place. My mother was very into the core of the city. She worked in politics, and you have to know your territory. It's an active matrix; we're all parts of it, but people don't often stop to wonder what's going on.
When working on your own, you can make a choice and find out six months later that you made a bad choice. But when you work with people you trust, who understand your obsessions, you can take risks.
Nineteen is as alive as 40-plus. I can vividly remember 19 and how I saw the world.
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.Collection: Inspirational
Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.Collection: Tattoo
The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.Collection: Want
A fish has no concept of water.Collection: Water
Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Lonliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best thing you can do it know yourself... know what you want.Collection: Lonely
Isn't it funny.I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than i ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.Collection: Love Is
It's such a liability to love another person.Collection: Liability
Find someone who will tremble for your touch, someone whose fingers are a poem.Collection: Touch Someone
How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it.Collection: Body
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.Collection: Loneliness
Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.Collection: People
How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.Collection: Survival
She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.Collection: Ocean
Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.Collection: Girl
Don't hoard the past. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.Collection: Artist
Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.Collection: Dream
Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.Collection: Men
Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.Collection: Heart
You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know.Collection: Thinking
Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.Collection: Mean
The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I.Collection: Mother
There used to be a category called women's fiction - meaning not too rude, not too much sex, a bit domestic and internal. Women have changed so much. We're so varied. And we've become more interested in the same varied experience in fiction.Collection: Sex
After all the fears, the warnings, after all, a woman's mistakes are different from a girl's. They are written by fire on stone. They are a trait and not an error.Collection: Girl
She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dressCollection: Beautiful
She was not used to being cruel, but he had taught her how.Collection: Taught
I wondered where he was now whether I would ever hear him again. Whether someone would love him, someday show him what beauty mean't.Collection: Mean
...You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump.Collection: Self
That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.Collection: Eye
I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.Collection: Mom
We recived our colouring from the Norsemen,hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees.We are the ones who sacked Rome.Fear only feeble old age and death in bed.Don't forget who you are.Collection: Rome
A cliche is everything you've ever heard of.Collection: Cliche
Writing mirrors the interior self. You know, any book is like the perfect blueprint of the psyche of the author.Collection: Book
What happened to a dream without a dreamer?Collection: Dream
she was such a bad actress. she never said her lines rite, it was something perverse in her nature. and wat was her line anyway?Collection: Lines
Wasn't that the way it always was? You didn't know, you couldn't tell, you just let it happen... Perhaps they didn't know themselves. Sometimes the line was very fine.Collection: Lines