Top 60 John Fante Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When stuck, hit the road.”

— John Fante

2. “Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?”

— John Fante

3. “Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets, I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen, as sure as there’s a God in heaven.”

— John Fante

4. “You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.”

— John Fante

5. “Ask the dust on the road! Ask the Joshua trees standing alone where the Mojave begins. Ask them about Camilla Lopez, and they will whisper her name.”

— John Fante

6. “Well, this is good for me, this is experience, I am here for a reason, these moments run into pages, the seamy side of life.”

— John Fante

7. “For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don’t believe in yourself.”

— John Fante

8. “If there is work there is warmth, that when a man has freedom of movement it is enough, for then his blood is hot too.”

— John Fante

9. “Religion is the opium of the people.”

— John Fante

10. “When your weakness are your strengths, you cry.”

— John Fante

11. “Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town!”

— John Fante

12. “Arturo Bandini: -What does happiness mean to you Camilla? Camilla: -That you can fall in love with whoever you want to, and not feel ashamed of it.”

— John Fante

13. “I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living.”

— John Fante

14. “I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed.”

— John Fante

15. “I was satisfied that I had done my best. She was insane.”

— John Fante

16. “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?”

— John Fante

17. “Living was hard enough. Dying was a supreme task.”

— John Fante

18. “The bible is a source of great inspiration to me. It is a textbook of metaphysics. Within the bible are keys to personal growth, and lessons in personal actualization. The bible is a spiritual masterpiece.”

— John Fante

19. “It is better to die of drink then to die of thirst.”

— John Fante

20. “Leave town, Henry. Leave before they trap you.”

— John Fante

21. “But, I have to smile, for the salt of the sea is in my blood, and there may be ten thousand roads over the land, but they shall never confuse me, for my heart’s blood will ever return to its beautiful source.”

— John Fante

22. “We talked, she and I. She asked about my work and it was a pretense, she was not interested in my work. And when I answered, it was a pretense. I was not interested in my work either. There was only one thing that interested us, and she knew it. She had made it plain by her coming.”

— John Fante

23. “When I go into a bookstore I always look for books by John Fante. If they are out-of-stock on one of his titles, I tell the clerk to order what is missing. I do it because I want people to read my father’s work.”

— John Fante

24. “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.”

— John Fante

25. “Look at the people who review. Look at their commitment to being “right” and “safe”. If I had listened to my critics I would have given up years ago.”

— John Fante

26. “So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your lash-in-the-pen genius, your one story-writer: a thief.”

— John Fante

27. “It is the persistent delusion of an hoodwinked mankind.”

— John Fante

28. “Someday, as an exercise, you might ask a writer to give himself the questions he wants to answer. If you really want a writer’s opinions, you have to ask for them. What you read might surprise you.”

— John Fante

29. “I write every morning. Two hours. Then I take a break and become my own secretary for a few hours. If I am “hot” I write in the afternoon and at night too.”

— John Fante

30. “Love wasn’t everything. Women weren’t everything. A writer had to conserve his energies.”

— John Fante

31. “The intelligent man makes certain reservations as to the choice of his listeners.”

— John Fante

32. “My advice to all young writers is quite simple. I would caution them never to evade a new experience. I would urge them to live life in the raw, to grapple with it bravely, to attack it with naked fists.”

— John Fante

33. “The Church must go, it is the haven of the booboisie, of boobs and bounders and all brummagem mountebanks.”

— John Fante

34. “There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. It was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness. Then men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them. All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.”

— John Fante

35. “Then I walked down the street toward Angel’s Flight, wondering what I would do that day. But there was nothing to do, and so I decided to walk around the town.”

— John Fante

36. “There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness.”

— John Fante

37. “My dear girl. I am equally fond of man and beast alike. There is not the slightest drop of enmity in my system.”

— John Fante

38. “I looked at the faces around me and I knew mine was like theirs. Faces with the blood drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colours draining fast. I had to get away from that town.”

— John Fante

39. “Ah, Evelyn and Vivian, I love you both, I love you for your sad lives, the empty misery of your coming home at dawn. You too are alone, but you are not like Arturo Bandini, who is neither fish, fowl nor good red herring. So have your champagne, because I love you both, and you too, Vivian, even if your mouth looks like it had been dug out with raw fingernails and your old child’s eyes swim in blood written like mad sonnets.”

— John Fante

40. “I was twenty then. What the hell, I used to say, take your time, Bandini. You got ten years to write a book, so take it easy, get out and learn about life, walk the streets. That’s your trouble: your ignorance of life.”

— John Fante

41. “One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Buker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.”

— John Fante

42. “Oh how I hate you, you filthy. But you’re cleaner than me, because you’ve got no mind to sell, just that poor flesh.”

— John Fante

43. “Murderer or bartender or writer, it didn’t matter: his fate was the common fate of all, his finish my finish; and here tonight in this city of darkened windows were other millions like him and like me: as indistinguishable as dying blades of grass. Living was hard enough. Dying was a supreme task.”

— John Fante

44. “Arturo Bandini was pretty sure that he wouldn’t go to hell when he died. The way to hell was the committing of mortal sin. He had committed many, he believed, but the confessional had saved him. He always got to confession on time – that is, before he died. And he knocked on wood whenever he thought of it – he always would get there on time – before he died. So Arturo was pretty sure he wouldn’t go to hell when he died. For two reasons. The confessional, and the fact that he was a fast runner.”

— John Fante

45. “They were myths I once believed, and now they were beliefs I felt were myths.”

— John Fante

46. “We were two miles from Bunker Hill, in the east part of town, in the section of factories and breweries. She.”

— John Fante

47. “Her hair spilled over the pillow like a bottle of overturned ink.”

— John Fante

48. “Are the dead restored? The books say no, the night shouts yes. I am twenty, I have reached the age of reason.”

— John Fante

49. “The celestial hypothesis is sheer propaganda formulated by the haves to delude the havenots.”

— John Fante

50. “Speak to me, Rosa. Look this way just once, over here Rosa, where I am watching.”

— John Fante