I wrote and drank at night. During the day I hung around the L.A. Public Library and read all the writers and it was hard reading; the writers used long paragraphs and pages of description, building the plot and developing character, but their characters were quite uninteresting and what the stories finally said wasn’t very much. Little was said of the wasted lives of almost all the people, the sadness, all the sadness, the madness, the laughter through pain. Most of the writers wrote about the experiences of upper middle-class life. I needed to read something that would get me through the day, across the street, something to hang to. I needed to get drunk on words, instead had to go to the bottle.