"Led Zeppelin didn't write tunes that everybody liked, they left that to the Bee Gees."

“At a fundamental level, as human beings, we are all the same; each one of us aspires to happiness and each one of us does not wish to suffer. This is why, whenever I have the opportunity, I try to draw people's attention to what as members of the human family we have in common and the deeply interconnected nature of our existence and welfare.”

“A large number of people to begin crawling through those tunnels and caves looking for the bad folks.”

“If the prisoner should ask the judge whether he would be content to be hanged, were he in his case, he would answer no. Then, says the prisoner, do as you would be done to.”

“Political leaders still think things can be done through force, but that cannot solve terrorism. Backwardness is the breeding ground of terror, and that is what we have to fight.”

“Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.”

“I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.”

“The mark of a top player is not how much he wins when he is winning but how he handles his losses.”

“Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths I once believed and now they were beliefs I felt were myths.”

Source : John Fante (2014). “The Bandini Quartet: Wait Until Spring, Bandini: The Road to Los Angeles: Ask the Dust: Dreams from Bunker Hill”, p.520, Canongate Books