“I talked to my friend Graham the other day and told him that perhaps it’d be better to forgo men altogether and take up with women, only I had a horrible suspicion that I’d wind up in the same heartbreak hotel as I did with men. ‘No you won’t,’ he reasoned. ‘YOU be the man and that way YOU get to be the shit.’ I had a sudden transplant of sense as I imagined myself “the man” and just how creepy I bet I could be: dodging emotional entanglements and lying and otherwise having a lovely time. Forgetting to phone.”

—Eve Babitz