“It suddenly occurred to me that true believers in hard-driving jazz—Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor—could never become owners of cleaning shops in malls across from railroad stations.”

“I could look at stationers' shops forever and ever.”

“On the subject of Egypt, Ellen Cherry was so vague she thought Ramses II was a jazz piano player. From that, we might conclude that she was equally dumb about jazz.”

“Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.”

“The question that sometimes drives me hazy, am I or the others crazy-Albert Einstein”

“Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?”