I am a road man for the lords of karma.

That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer - he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

No cop was ever born who wasn't a sucker for a finely-executed high-speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those clover-leaf freeway interchanges.

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I've regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine.

There is no fool like a careless gambler who starts taking victory for granted.

Things are no longer what they seem to be. My telephones are haunted, and animals whisper at me from unseen places.

I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.