“He had since forever been working on a book called Uncanny Blossom. When Leon had told him, Billy had said, “I had no idea you were entering the Shit Title Olympics.” “If you didn’t swim in your sump of ignorance you’d know that title’s designed to fuck with the French. Neither word’s translatable into their ridiculous language.”

“They didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.”

“I wish you had fucked her. Then you’d know. Then you’d know the sublime … Her asshole, for example. It’s like a stern coquettish spoiled secretary working for Himmler—”

“It was as if pain were a room he had entered and the door had been locked behind him.”

“When I asked him for some explanation as to why he wanted to kill me, he said it was because he didn't like his jobs. When I asked him since when had he not liked his jobs, he said since always. When I remarked that he had never told me this, and that I had gotten the impression that he had liked them, he said: "How is that possible? You know me. Do I strike you as stupid or boring?""No.""Then how could you think I would enjoy being an etiquette expert, or a Weight Watchers' counselor, or a stripper? How could you think that someone like me, with my mind, my character, would derive any satisfaction from those things?”

“A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.” He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work.”