“After girls we talked about the officers, and which ones hated us most that week, and how we never did anything to deserve it, and they were just assholes, and if they didn’t have those stripes on their shoulders, they wouldn’t be so tough. Man-to-man we could take them. That was all talk too, I guess.”

“We were at the White House a couple of weeks ago," the man says, "they had a state dinner for Prince Charles and Camilla. Listen, those royals are just the finest people, no pretensions to them whatsoever. You can talk to Prince Charles about anything." Billy nods. There's a silence. Just in time he asks, "What did you talk about?" "Hunting," the man answers.”

“There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down.She turned to me and said, "Oh! You're one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?""In physics," I said."Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can't talk about it.""On the contrary," I answered. "It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance--gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood--so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!"I don't know how they do it. There's a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it!”

“First we talked about girls. Not girls like any of us had ever seen in the flesh, but those girls in magazines with huge tits and puffed-up lips and sleepy eyes, like they'd been fucked hard all night and they were mostly pouting now because the guy finally pulled out. We talked about those girls a lot. And it was all talk.”

“We all talk about how much we hate lies. Yet we prefer, so often, to be lied to....because it allows us to dodge all those painful truths we'd rather not hear.”

“Hey, remember when you didn’t know that you wanted Otter to spray his man babies all over your face and we didn’t have to talk about our feelings all the time?” “Yeah, those were the good old days.”