I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse.

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.

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.

You can't stamp on a man's corns when he's got his feet cut off.

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.

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

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.