“I swear, sometimes talking to you is like trying to converse with a tree. A very big, very solid, very male tree.”

“And the boy loved the tree.......very much. And the tree was happy.”

“The difficulty with this conversation is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees. ”

“The short conversation that follows eventually led to a tree religion. Its tenet of faith was this: a tree that was a good tree and led a clean decent and upstanding life could be assured of a future life after death. If it was very good indeed it would eventually be reincarnated as five thousand rolls of lavatory paper.”

“I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction.”

“What the hell was that?” I gasped. “Premature inflammation,” he replied. “Happens sometimes. Very embarrassing. I don’t like to talk about it.”