When life attains a crisis, man’s focus narrows. […] The world becomes a stage of immediate concern, swept free of illusion.

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

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.

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.

It doesn't matter what answers you get if you ask the wrong questions.

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

Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow.

A weed is a plant out of place.

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.

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

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.

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

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.