“Is all niceness then or is all buggery? How can a man be forty-five years old and still not know whether all is niceness or buggery? How does one know for sure?”

“George: [On getting the M.B.E.]'After all we did for Great Britain, selling all that corduroy and making it swing, they gave us that bloody old leather medal with wooden string through it. But my initial reaction was, 'Oh, how nice, how nice.' And John's was, 'How nice, how nice.”

“How did you do that?” Mr. Poe asked. “Nice girls shouldn’t know how to do such things.”“My sister is a nice girl,” Klaus said, “and she knows how to do all sorts of things.”

“When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.”

“I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly. I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty!”

“No one really does know how to have fun here at all. It is all etiquette.”