"If you think back to the Swift Boat debacle of 2004, the surface issue was John Kerry's honesty and bravery as a sailor in Vietnam. Far more powerful, however, was the meta-message: George Bush slaps John Kerry around and Kerry either can't or won't hit back. For voters concerned with security and the toughness of their leaders, that's a devastating message — and one that has little or nothing to do with the truth of the surface charges. Someone who can't fight for himself certainly can't fight for you. At the time I called it the "Republicans' bitch-slap theory of electoral politics.""

"Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power."

"In the popular political imagination we're familiar with the neocons as conniving militarists, masters of intrigue and cabals, graspers for the oil supplies of the world, and all the rest. But here we have them in what I suspect is the truest light: as college kid rubes who head out for a weekend in Vegas, get scammed out of their money by a two-bit hustler on the first night and then get played for fools by a couple hookers who leave them naked and handcuffed to their hotel beds."

"All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening."

"Well, if I were thus rationed in this article and could have but one adjective for George Gershwin, that adjective would be "ingenuous." Ingenuous at and about his piano. Once an occasional composer named Oscar Levant stood beside that piano while those sure, sinewy, catlike Gershwin fingers beat their brilliant drum-fire—the tumultuous cascade of the "Rhapsody In Blue," the amorous languor of "The Man I Love," the impish glee of "Fascinating Rhythm," the fine, jaunty, dust-spurning scorn of "Strike Up the Band." If the performer was familiar with the work of any other composer, he gave no evidence of it. Levant (who, by the way, makes a fleeting appearance in the new Dashlell Hammett book, under the guise of Levi Oscant) could be heard mutterIng under his breath, "An evening with Gershwin Is a Gershwln evening." "I wonder," said our young composer dreamily, "if my music will be played a hundred years from now." "It certainly will be," said the bitter Levant,"if you are still around.""

"Once in pre-war days, when curiously-bonneted women drivers were familiar sights at the taxi-wheels, I cried out to one in my dismay: "Is there no speed limit in this mad city?" "Oh, yes, monsieur," she answered sweetly over her shoulder, "but no one has ever succeeded in reaching it.""

"The two oldest professions in the world — ruined by amateurs."

"Dorothy Parker and I were standing on the sidewalk during the intermission of a Shubert opening night when the Alexander Woolcott, his rotund figure draped in an inverness cape, came toward us. I say "us" but I mean "her." Woolcott rarely wasted his minutes on anyone less than a potential celebrity, and not being very potential, I had already been introduced to him for at least the tenth time. "Why don't you two come back to my apartment after the curtain comes down, when this mountain of crap is en route to Kane's warehouse? You can have a drink with Junior while I'm writing the obit, and then perhaps a game of anagrams, if this faylow," meaning me, "I never remember his name, can spell." [...] It was the beginning of an attentive friendship, as I could judge by the number and caliber of clever insults launched in my direction. I became a regular at his Sunday breakfasts where I met the by-liners of the city and its theatrical stars. For Woolcott it was always a command performance. He worked at his friendships, and despaired when any one of his chosen group misinterpreted his abuse. Au fond sentimental as Shirley Temple underneath that biting exterior, he refused to be criticized himself."

"I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini."

"Alexander Woollcott: What could be rarer than a Woollcott First Edition? Franklin Pierce Adams: A Woollcott second edition."

"[You look like] a dishonest Abe Lincoln."

"I have no need of your God-damned sympathy. I only wish to be entertained by some of your grosser reminiscences."

"I've never had the impertinence to be sorry for Helen Keller. I'd as soon be sorry for Niagara Falls. But now as I bring the story up to date, I'm shriveled with shame when I recall that at times in my life — my easy life — I've actually been sorry for myself. You too? We've got our nerve, haven't we?"

"At 83 Shaw's mind was perhaps not quite as good as it used to be, but it was still better than anyone else's."

"The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact. Every play-by-play description on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds. Even Sound and light can only go so fast."

"I do hereby and forever abandon abandoning all hope. Honestly, I give up on giving up. I'm just not cut out to be some hopeless, disillusioned wretch with no aspirations for the rest of the eternity, sprawled catatonic in my own feces on a cold stone floor. In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple of days of hopelessness. Future scientists would call it Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case of history chasing rainbows."

"If the living are haunted by the dead. Then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.""

"Yes, and I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smokey eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's the kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive 'let them eat cake' type of chauvinism."

"In Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth."

"It simply makes sense that I should miss my parents more than they miss me, especially when you consider that they only loved me for thirteen years while I loved them my entire life."

"The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our head says, 'I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew.' Meaning: I may be me - but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU."

"If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead."

"What makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven."

"Her dress, swimsuit-tight, leotard-tight, her pantyhose run with women pedaling bicycles going nowhere at a thousand calories an hour."

"You will always have some excuse not to live your life."

"Until you can ignore your circumstances, and just do as you promise," he says, "you'll always be controlled by the world."

"Some stories, she'd say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be."

"Their teeth white, as if they never used teeth for anything except to smile."

"That's the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell."

"Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy if you waste their gift sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport."

"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don't recognize as real."

"Some stories, you use up. Others use you up."

"Some stories, Mr.Whitter would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up. p288"

"People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves."

""The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors." p144"

""I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong again." p76"

"Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us," Mr Whittier says, "It's how we digest our lives. Our experiences."

"We love drama. We love conflict. We need a devil or we'll create one."

"If there's a trick to doing a job you hate... Mrs. Clark says it's to find a job you hate even more."

"That's how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It recreates some forgotten terror. Something we'd like to think we're grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It's something you'd hoped was healed."

"Chapter 19, Absolution"

"We should forgive God..."

"The whole idea of men creating perfect robot women for their own pleasure, it happens every day. The most "beautiful" women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotypes of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of Cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look."

"I lost my virginity through my ear."

"With the angel of death going door to door, people stayed together. They quit bitching and behaved."

""What matters," Sister Vigilante says, "is, people need a monster they can believe in." A true horrible enemy. A demon to define themselves against. Otherwise, it's just us versus us."

""Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you." p205"

"As a fundraiser, our first idea was 'Five Bucks to Punch a Mime.'"

"This is just what human beings do-turn objects into people, people into objects. Back and forth. Tit for tat."