“My favourite prank in heavy metalwork was to get a penny and spend three or four minutes making it really hot with a blowtorch, and then leave it on Mr Lane’s desk, so that he’d see it and pick it up out of curiosity.First you’d hear: ‘Waaaaahhhhhh!’Then: ‘Osbourne, you little bastard!’Heh-heh-heh.The old hot-penny trick. Priceless, man.”

“Your mother mentioned she had a little girl. These are for you, sweetheart. Just a little something, heh heh." He handed me a wrinkled paper bag with a grease spot on it. I hate it when you could hear a person's saliva right in their laugh.”

“They spent all week saving pennies and went out Saturdays to spend fifty bucks in three hours.”

“The tension was so thick in the room, it was too much. He was too much. I couldn’t take the pressure, so I panicked. Sexy and in control Grace left and twelve-year-old Grace took her place. “Heh, heh, you said nuts,” I burst out. My self-edit button was now turned off for good.”

“I’m a natural salesman. I sold my soul to the devil. I’m so shrewd that I got pennies on the dollar for it. Ha! Wait, a buyer who gets pennies on the dollar is the clever one in the deal. Damn it! Lucifer tricked me!”

“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.”