"Maybe I should have got some chili-slaw dogs from Shorty’s. Everybody loves those.” “Buddy,” Lars said, dropping his shoes to the deck with a thump, “sit yourself down and stop fussing. You’re reminding me of my Aunt Glynna with all this temperature takin’ and foil tuckin’. This food is fine."

"Often we may even smile or laugh at adversity, but all people share the same passions. They are merely manifest differently according to one's culture and conditioning."

"One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness."

"Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before."

"Darkness will come knocking. It will offer everything you never had. But its gift is just a cheap knockoff of something it cannot be. Never accept the hand of the Beast."

"If the girl is good looking and talented, and for some reason the film doesn't work, she gets a second chance. But if subsequent films don't work, she gets branded as an 'iron leg.' The whole thing gets negative."

"But I want people to understand that poker's not all glamorous, it's not all being on TV and making tons of money. It's a hard life. It's a lot of travel. It's a lot of weird hours."

"Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again."