The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.

You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today's cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it's needed ... You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry.

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

....basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste.

This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.