Top 31 Quotes & Sayings by Eve Babitz

I looked like Brigitte Bardot, and I was Stravinsky's goddaughter.

I was in love with Paul Butterfield.

People with brains went to New York, and people with faces came West.

I was sure that somewhere a grandiose carnival was going on in the sky, and I was missing it.

I met Harrison Ford at Barney's Beanery. And I met Steve Martin at the bar at the Troubador. He said he wanted to be a stand-up comic. I thought that was the worst idea because he was so square, so Orange County.

By 1976, I was, like, Gonesville. I practically lived at the Troubador for several years. When Bette Midler was there for six weeks, I went every day for both shows. I sat there mesmerized. The only person who went as much as I did was Cher.

Musicians are impossible.

When I promise I'll do something, I do it. At least since I got sober.

I posed as an album-cover designer and photographer... That I today have some album covers and photographs to show for myself is a monument to the attention-to-detail of my disguise.

I like handsome-devil artists the best.

I'm a mermaid now, half my body.

'Dirty Dancing' is one of my favorite movies, and I was in love with Patrick Swayze for years, but I tried to stay out of his way and never to meet him because I knew if I did, he'd want to talk about yogurt or some weird dietary restriction or something.

Everybody steals my lines.

I wasn't as used to the new dumb questions, so when men I had once thought of as wise daddies now asked me 'How do you write?' I did not try and spill red wine in their suede pants. I would just smile and say, 'On a typewriter in the mornings when there's nothing else to do.'

I've been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I've loved and the ideas I've embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand it.

Partner dancing is a cultured act.

I knew just by reading this guy, Nathanael West, that he was probably one of those icky East Coast guys with glasses who got mad because when he came to L.A., all those starlets preferred producers or cowboys to him.

I've often noticed that there is a moment when a man develops enough confidence and ease in a relationship to bore you to death. Sometimes one hardly even notices it's happened, that moment, until some careless remark arouses one's suspicions.

The only reason anything was off-white at the Chateau was because it had once been just plain white.

From earliest childhood, I have rejoiced over the Santa Ana winds. I know those winds the way the Eskimos know their snows.

I had thrown my body in for art... I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)

I was always much too elated to imagine despair.

You know, also I, you know, I was on those birth control pills and my breasts were like, they hurt... and, you know, it was like they blew up like. You know, they wouldn't fit into any of my dresses. I had to quit taking those birth control pills... This was like - I mean they were like, I thought they should be photographed really... So they were, for immortality. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)

... I find myself coming out of the library with all women writers. I keep hoping the library attendant won't notice, but when 8 out of 8 of the books you take out are by women, you try not to look too dykey.

By the time I'd grown up, I naturally supposed that I'd grown up

There are only three things to say about cocaine. One, there is no such thing as enough. Two, it will never be as good as the first time. Three, those first two facts constitute a tragedy of expense in ways that can't be experienced unless you've had cocaine. ... Your brain will settle into a puddle around your sinuses and you will die.

There are three basic personality factors in cats: The kind who run up when you say hello and rub against you in cheap romance; the kind who run away certain that you mean to ravish them; and the kind who just look back and don't move a muscle. I love all three kinds.

[Photographer Julian Wasser] had this great idea that I should play chess naked with Marcel Duchamp and it seem to be such a great idea that it was just like the best idea I'd ever heard in my life. It was like a great idea. I mean, it was - Not only was it vengeance, it was art, and it was, like, a great idea. And even if it didn't get any vengeance, it would still turn out okay with me because, you know, I would be sort of immortalized.

It's the frames which make some things important and some things forgotten. It's all only frames from which the content rises.

It was all balance. But then, she already knew that from surfing.

Derek Taylor was where all the razz-ma-tazz and class sprang from; the Beatles were just charming, rich young men.