If the Good Lord made a mistake in us people it was in making us want to live when we’ve got the least excuse for it.

Then he laughed and she laughed. And quivering with the movement of the train, the dead man seemed to laugh too.

There is only one plot-things are not what they seem.

You've got forever; and somehow you can't do much with it. You've got forever; and it's a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.

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

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