“Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”

“He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next”

“As I say, all all he wanted from the manuscript was the string. That was the way he was. Nobody could predict what he was going to be interested in next. On the day of the bomb it was string. [...] He had no use at all for tricks and games and rules that other people made up.”

“I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.”

“Billy didn't want to marry ugly Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of his disease.He knew he was going crazy, when he heard himself proposing marriage to her., when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his companion for life.”

“Billy took off his tri-focals and his coat and his necktie and his shoes, and he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.”

“Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, "I think you guys are going to have to come up with lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.”