Kyril Bonfiglioli

I don't much care about tea-drinking in the afternoon; in the morning the stuff Jock brings to me in bed is like that Nepenthe which the wife of Thone gave to Jove-born Helena, but in the p.m. it always makes me think of Ganges mud in which crocodiles have been coupling.

You will learn nothing of importance from this story except, perhaps, how to die; but then, you were born knowing that and in any case it only has to be done once. It is easy: ask anyone who has done it.

A moral coward, you see, is simply someone who has read the fine print on the back of his Birth Certificate and seen the little clause which says "You can't win."

"You would now be an enemy, in the third class, of my own organization."

"Only third class?" I asked in the indignant tones which Queen Victoria surely used when she received the Abyssinian Order of Chastity, Second Class.

It will be a sad day for the world when the Oriental gent realizes that Western bumbling is only Eastern guile in a different idiom. Well, a lot of it, anyway.

I have this heavy addiction to life and I'm told that the withdrawal symptoms are shocking.

The cold pork in the fridge was wilting at the edges; it and I exchanged looks of mutual contempt, like two women wearing the same hat in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

Fate's fickle finger was feeling for my fundament.

To be on foot in the United States is only immoral, not illegal.

Sleep slunk up like a black panther and sank its kindly fangs into what remained of the Mortdecai brain.

The coffee having arrived (how hard it is to write without the ablative absolute!) we guzzled genteelly for a while...

"No no, Jock…we're going to push him out of a window. Your bedroom window, I think. Yes, and we'll undress him first and say that he was making advances to you and jumped out of the window in a frenzy of thwarted love."

"I say, Charlie, really, what a filthy rotten idea; I mean, think of my wife."

"I never think of policemen's wives, their beauty maddens me like wine."