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John Fante

117 quotes

“That night I slept there, but the next morning I began to hate the place. With her there it was part of a dream; without her, it was a house. I packed my things into the rumble seat and drove back to Los Angeles.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I went for a walk through the streets. My God, here I was again, roaming the town. 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 colors draining fast. I had to get away from that town.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The greying east brightened, metamorphosed to pink, then red, and then the giant ball of fire rose out of the blackened hills. Across the desolation lay a supreme indifference, the casualness of night and another day, and yet the secret intimacy of those hills, their silent consoling wonder, made death a thing of no great importance. You could die, but the desert would hide the secret of your death, it would remain after you, to cover your memory with ageless wind and heat and cold.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Far out across the Mojave there arose the shimmer of heat. I made my way up the path to the Ford. In the seat was a copy of my book, my first book. I found a pencil, opened the book to the fly leaf, and wrote: To Camilla, with love, Arturo I carried the book a hundred yards into the desolation, toward the southeast. With all my might I threw it far out in the direction she had gone. Then I got into the car, started the engine, and drove back to Los Angeles.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I stretched out on the bed and slept. It was twilight when I awakened and turned on the light. I felt better, no longer tired. I went to the typewriter and sat before it. My thought was to write a sentence, a single perfect sentence. If I could write one good sentence I could write two and if I could write two I could write three, and if I could write three I could write forever. [...] I sat erect before the typewriter and blew on my fingers. Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don't desert me now. I started to write.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ** Ch.26 - p.748 [Page numbers per "The Bandini Quartet" (four books in one) published by Canongate Books Ltd., 2004, British Edition.]
“Nobody crossed him without a battle. He disliked almost everything, particularly his wife, his children, his neighbors, his church, his priest, his town, his state, his country, and the country from which he emigrated. Nor did he give a damn for the world either, or the sun or the stars, or the universe, or heaven or hell. But he liked women.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch.3 - at p.21 [Page numbers per the Canongate Books Ltd paperback, 2005 edition.]
“I had come to the limits of shooting pool, playing poker and bullshitting over beers, of driving off with other guys and broads into lonely orchards, clawing clumsily at skirts and panties, clawing in vain. Women were fine but demanding, you hurt easily at nineteen; you thought women were sweet and submissive but find them alley cats; you find comfort in whores less deceitful, and if you are lucky you learn to read.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I lay on my back and thought of the future. Any hopes for writing would have to be postponed. What mattered now was just staying alive. From that day forward I resolved never to be poor again. I would work hard for Coletti and the Toyo Fish Company. I would hoard every penny. I would jingle coins in my pocket and store away dollars in the bank. I would cover my body, my life, with money. I would be impregnable. I would not be hurt again.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You ain't gonna live forever, so enjoy it while you can.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man could change, if only to survive.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then one day [i.e. while in the Los Angeles Public Library] I pulled a book down and opened it, and there it was. I stood for a moment, reading. Then like a man who had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table. The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me. I had a library card. I checked the book out, took it to my room, climbed into my bed and read it, and I knew long before I had finished that here was a man who had evolved a distinct way of writing. The book was Ask the Dust and the author was John Fante. He was to be a lifetime influence on my writing.”
John Fante (1909–1983) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Charles Bukowski - Introduction (dated 5 June 1979) to the republished Ask the Dust (1939, 1980)
“But I was gone, hurrying through the darkness of the vast warehouse, only the echo of [Naylor's] voice reaching me. On the way out I passed through the wet clammy room where they dumped mackerel, from the fishing boats. But tonight there were no mackerel, the season had just ended, and instead there were tuna, the first real tuna I ever saw in such numbers, the floor littered with them, thousands of them scattered over a carpet of dirty ice, their white corpse-like bellies blundering through the semi-darkness. Some of them were still alive. You could hear the sporadic slapping of tails. There in front of me flapped the tail of one who was more alive than dead. I dragged him out of the ice. He was bitter cold and still kicking. I carried him as best I could, dragging him too, until I got him upon the cutting table where the women would dress him tomorrow. He was tremendous, weighing almost a hundred pounds, a monster of a fellow from another world, with great strength still left in his body, and a streak of blood coming from his eye, where he had been hooked. Strong as a man, he hated me and tried to break away from the cutting board. I pulled a gutting knife from the board and held it under his white pulsing gills. "You monster!" I said. "You black monster! Spell Weltanschauung! Go on - spell it!" But he was a fish from another world; he couldn't spell anything. The best he could do was fight for his life, and he was already too tired for that. But even so, he almost got away. I slugged him with my fist. Then I slid the knife under his gill, amused at his helpless gasping, and cut off his head. "When I said spell Weltanschauung, I meant it!" I pushed him back among his comrades upon the ice. "Disobedience means death." There was no response save the faint flapping of a tail somewhere in the blackness. I wiped my hands on a gunny sack and walked into the street toward home.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch.15 - p.334-335 [Page numbers per "The Bandini Quartet" (four books in one) published by Canongate Books Ltd., 2004, British Edition.]
“Tonight there was music in the saloon, a piano and a violin; two fat women with hard masculine faces and short haircuts. Their song was Over the Waves. Ta de da da, and I watched Camilla dancing with her beer tray. Her hair was so black, so deep and clustered, like grapes hiding her neck. This was a sacred place, this saloon. Everything here was holy, the chairs, the tables, that rag in her hand, that sawdust under her feet. She was a Mayan princess and this was her castle. I watched the tattered huaraches glide across the floor, and I wanted those huaraches. I would like them to hold in my hands against my chest when I fell asleep. I would like to hold them and breathe the odor of them.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The landlady had white hair. Around her neck was a high net collar fitting tightly like a corset. She was in her seventies, a tall woman who increased her height by rising on tiptoe and peering at me over her glasses...She smiled with a smile that seemed to hurt her face, cracking it open with old lines that broke up the dry flesh around her mouth and cheeks...She was lonely, and so lost and still proud. One afternoon she took me to her apartment on the top floor. It was like walking into a well-dusted tomb...For two hours she talked of Bert, and Lord! how she loved that man, even in death, but he was not dead at all; he was in that apartment, watching over her, protecting her, daring me to hurt her...The tea was old. The sugar was old and lumpish. The tea cups were dusty, and somehow the tea tasted old and the little dried up cookies tasted of death. When I got up to leave, Bert followed me through the door and down the hall, daring me to think cynically of him.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Standing at the mirror, I tilted my hat over one eye and examined myself. The image in the glass seemed only vaguely familiar. I didn't like my new tie, so I took off my coat and tried another. I didn't like the change either. All at once everything began to irritate me. The stiff collar was strangling me. The shoes pinched my feet. The pants smelled like a clothing store basement and were too tight in the crotch. Sweat broke out at my temples where the hat band squeezed my skull. Suddenly I began to itch, and when I moved everything crackled like a paper sack. My nostrils picked up the powerful stench of lotions, and I grimaced. Mother in Heaven, what had happened to the old Bandini, author of The Little Dog Laughed? Could this hog-tied, strangling buffoon be the creator of The Long Lost Hills? I pulled everything off, washed the smells out of my hair, and climbed into my old clothes.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then it happened. One night as the rain beat on the slanted kitchen roof a great spirit slipped forever into my life. I held his books in my hands and trembled as he spoke to me of man and the world, of love and wisdom, pain and guilt, and I knew I would never be the same. His name was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. He knew more of fathers and sons than any man in the world, of brothers and sisters, priests and rogues, guilt and innocence. Dostoyevsky changed me. The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler. He turned me inside out. I found I could breathe, could see invisible horizons. It was time to become a man, to leave San Elmo and go out into the world. I wanted to think and feel like Dostoyevsky. I wanted to write.”
John Fante (1909–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source