“it's better to be happy...if you can..!!”

“It's better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.”

“Generally, I decided, it was better to wait, if you had any feeling for the individual. If you hated her right off, it was better to fuck her right off; if you didn't, it was better to wait, then fuck her and hate her later on.”

“It's like a movie, I thought, like a fucking movie. It seemed funny to me. It felt as if we were on camera. I liked it. It was better than the racetrack, it was better than the boxing matches. We kept drinking.”

“The more crap you believe, the better off you are.”

“we had goldfish and they circled around and aroundin the bowl on the table near the heavy drapescovering the picture window and my mother, always smiling, wanting us allto be happy, told me, “be happy, Henry!” and she was right: it’s better to be happy if youcanbut my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while raging inside his 6-foot-2 frame because he couldn’t understand what was attacking him from within. my mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times aweek, telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile!why don’t you ever smile?”and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was thesaddest smile I ever saw. one day the goldfish died, all five of them, they floated on the water, on their sides, theireyes still open,and when my father got home he threw them to the cat there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mothersmiled.A smile to remember”

“Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.”