Robert Stone

"Are we friends today?" she asked him.

"There's a level, Justin, on which we're always friends. Then there's a level on which we can't be."

All anybody cares about in this fucking country, he thought, is money.

"The thing to do with embarrassment," he told the young American couple who seemed determined to engage him, "is work it all the way to humiliation."

"When you stir up the bottom you naturally bring up some big fish."

With the thought came the recollection of a poem he had once heard read, about a mouse so frightened it went to the cat for love.

"You and I, my boy, compose a tiny island of sanity in what is otherwise a fucking nuthouse."

"It's a Walt fucking Disney true life adventure, sweetheart," he told her. "That's all it is."

"The Deep Six comes for all, babe, the rich man and Lazarus."

"We're at a very primitive stage of mankind," Nolan declared, "that's what people don't understand. Just pick up the Times on any given day and you've got a catalogue of ape behaviour. Strip away the slogans and excuses and verbiage, the so-called ideology, and you're reading about what one pack of chimpanzees did to another."

"We have a proverb, sir, in my grandfather's country. In his island. I'm positive they have the same proverb in China. It goes 'To trust is good. Not to trust is better.' "

"Ladies and gentlemen," Holliwell declaimed, "esteemed colleagues." Who in hell, he wondered, are these people?

"What I wonder," Bob Cole said in his strange tremulous voice, "is whether the people down here have to live this way so that we can live the way we do. We have to believe it's no, don't we? We couldn't face up to it otherwise. Because if most of the world lives in this kind of poverty so that we can have our goodies and our extra protein ration - what does that make us?"