"Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult."

"Water! Of all liquids on Earth, the only one chosen for scrubbin' and flushin'. The liquid they rinse baby's nappies in, the fluid that floods the gutters o' this cloud-squeezer town; a single drop o' water discolors a glass of Irish, and you, false friend, are wantin' me to pour this abrasive substance into me defenseless body!"

"I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o' cassette player if I'm not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affaction."

"There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition."

"Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich."

"My lunar sign is in Virgo. Every month when the moon is full, I'm driven to balance my checkbook and straighten up my apartment. I can't help myself. Instead of a werewolf I turn into an accountant."

"...the natural process of aging, which according to Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy, is so unnaturally cruel that only man could have ordained it — neither nature nor God would stoop so low."

"The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever."

"... overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between a German opera and a hockey game."

"She needed help, but God was in a meeting whenever she rang."

"Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand."

"If you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropiate port you find yourself docked."

"Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air — moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh — felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing."

"You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House."

"I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners."

"In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow."

"The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet he seems to connect the populace to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest."

"If you didn't serve the nasty fellow (God), the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down."

"Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic."

"Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard."

"Above the building, the sky recalled passages from Les Miserables, threadbare and gray."

"It is so amusing the way that mortals misunderstand the shape, or shapes, of time. … In the realms of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. … Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received."

"They glared at her the way any intelligent persons ought to glare when what they need is a smoke, a bite, a cup of coffee, a piece of ass, or a good fast-paced story, and all they're getting is philosophy."

"Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl's gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord's last pratfall, and after all that time we still don't know where passion goes when it goes."

"Who knows how to make love stay? Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."

"This is the way to burn," the fuse seemed to be saying to the more docile, slow-witted candlewick. "Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn."

"Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning."

"Bernard Mickey Wrangle had developed a psychological test of his own. It was short, simple, and infallible. To administer the test, merely ask the subject to name his or her favorite Beatle. If you are at all familiar with the distinct separate public images of the four Beatles, then you'll recognize that the one chosen reveals as much about the subject's personality as most of us will ever hope to know."

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

"I'll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I'd rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit."

"Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense."

"The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist."

"Any half-awake materialist well knows — that which you hold holds you."

"She tried out the chamber pot, although she really had nothing to contribute."

"A rabbi's dog could score pork chops in the streets of Tel Aviv easier than Bernard could acquire tequila in King County Jail."

""I'll follow him to the ends of the earth," she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that."

"Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue."

"This stuff's so fine Julius Caesar called for it with his dying breath. 'A toot, Brutus,' is what he said."

"They snuggled closer, and when they were as close as they could get without being behind one another, they commenced to kiss again."

"If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws."

"A better world has gotta start somewhere. Why not with you and me?"

"The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to the overpopulation problem might rest in such handshakes."

"He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness that comedians shift into when they get their chance to play Hamlet."

"There are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better."