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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was a bad one, the Winter of 1933. Wading home that night through flames of snow, my toes burning, my ears on fire, the snow swirling around me like a flock of angry nuns, I stopped dead in my tracks. The time had come to take stock. Fair weather or foul, certain forces in the world were at work trying to destroy me.

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

When stuck, hit the road.

I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living

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.

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.