“Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible”

“I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.”

“He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.”

“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.”

“Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency'.”

“But when I roamed New York City, knowing so much and capable of speaking so nicely, and yet so lonely, and often hungry and cold, I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family.”

“As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply: 'Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me.”