“Your mother's cunt has a peculiar tubular shape!' he yelled. 'Nonetheless, I tolerate its effluvium and enthusiastically lick its inner folds whenever she demands!”

“Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She's beautiful; when you're with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence; your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she's been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you.”

“You don't like the girl. You don't know what color eyes she has, you don't like her.”

“Every woman has a dream lover and anightmare lover. The nightmare lover, he just lies on top of her, crushing her with his belly, jabbing his little tool in and out till he's finished. He got his eyes clenched shut, he doesn't say a word; essentially he's just jerking off in the poor girl's pussy. (Kolya Vlasov)”

“She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. Her mouth was cold, her lips rough from the winter wind, and if the mystics are right and we are doomed to repeat our squalid lives ad infinitum, at least I will always return to that kiss.”

“You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen.”

“What Slattery wants is a ring painted on concrete in the empty desert. With no living spectator around for miles, just him and the grinning demons. A chance to fight them each, one by one . . . to leave them broken and humbled, or even to lose the fights, but with nobility, and earn the respect of all the men who have showed him none. I want peace, he thinks to himself late at night. I want peace. But then he dreams of fistfights.”