I'd been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever's got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped.

I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more.

I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway.

In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He’ll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can’t figure out whether the hero’s laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff—a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything.

If we all had all we wanted to eat, we'd crap too much. We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry.

There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.

There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.