- “‘Mostly I just kill time,’ he said, ‘and it dies hard.’”
- “Money. Those are the first five letters of his alphabet.”
- “Like a lot of people that read a law book he thinks the law is in it.”
- “A good jail is one of the quietest places in the world.”
- “Then he sat down near his briefcase on the far side of a scarred oak table that came out of the Ark. Noah bought it secondhand.”
- “I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.”
- “She was standing close to me. I smelled her perfume. Or thought I did. It hadn’t been put on with a spray gun. Perhaps it was just the summer day.”
- “He has as much charm as a steel puddler’s underpants.”
- “Nothing ever looks emptier than an empty swimming pool.”
- “When you said goodnight in those days you tried not to make it sound like goodbye.”