The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson’s Ice Cream shop. Mona Simpson Read Quote
I’ve never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy’s Prince Kutuzov. Mona Simpson Read Quote
I suppose ‘My Hollywood’ is only as politically meaningful as it is deeply inside the least powerful of its characters. I wanted it to reveal scenes of subtle exploitation, odd instances of accidental power and challenges to decency specific to its time, but also impulses of generosity that transcend our particular era’s messes. Mona Simpson Read Quote
I felt like any other American kid. I already worked at a steady job as an ice cream scooper, but I didn’t feel less in any way than my more affluent friends from school. Mona Simpson Read Quote
I’ve never had an exclusive relationship to a room where I write. I used to want one. Mona Simpson Read Quote
In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street. Mona Simpson Read Quote
I remember the excitement of finding a great pancake recipe in ‘Gourmet.’ It felt as if it were mine. And it was Berkeley, of course – everybody cooked together. Cooking is what one did. Mona Simpson Read Quote
I’m a simple cook, and there’s a lot I don’t eat. But food is important. It translates so easily into pleasure. Mona Simpson Read Quote
I eventually made the reunion with my father that I’d used as a default daydream throughout my childhood, but by then, we’d both outgrown the only relationship we could have had to each other. I was over 30 by the time I met him again and no longer needed a father. Mona Simpson Read Quote
