Alleys Quotes

My mom and I lived at Hollywood and Western, a drug-dealer and prostitute corner. It was pretty terrifying. I got beat up a lot. I saw people have sex in the alleys. I remember I was 5 years old, and this guy with a trench coat, needles and crack cornered me. Early on, seeing the devastation on my block, seeing heroin addicts, made me think twice about ever getting involved in drugs. It`s evil. Once you take that step and experiment, drugs can take over your life. You are not yourself anymore. That`s something I never wanted. I didn`t have a lot of friends growing up. It was kind of just me and my parents. But because of them, the neighborhood did not have a bad effect on me. My dad introduced me to artists, and every few months we`d go to some hippie doo-dah parade as Mudmen in our underwear, carrying sticks and covered in mud. My mother did everything to get me into the best schools she could find.

(On his family and growing up) "Well we moved a lot. I didn`t just grow up in Iowa. I grew up in a lot of different places. We were all born in Boston, my brother and my dad, and I were all born in Boston, and then eventually we moved to Iowa. My dad and my mom create high-class nightclubs, bowling alleys, and billiard halls, places where women feel safe. And they`re all over the country, so they travel back and forth to make sure they`re all going smoothly."

Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.