Over the years I'd surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian… — Michael Chabon

I had a certain cetacean delicacy of movement in the wide open sea of a hundred-yard field...

Although it was only nine o'clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he'd strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his companions were beginning, with delight and aplomb, to barf. It was definitely a Crabtree kind of night.

I knew that I shouldn't have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together.