“People say it is not the key to happiness, but I have always figured if you have enough money you can have a key made.”

“I said, "Is there!" I told him there is a Mafia school where they teach them math if Johnny has ten fingers and they cut off two, how many does he have left?”

“Somehow, some way, every person in the arts has to find an accommodation with disappointment and embarrassment. They are the pollen in the air we breathe.”

“It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything staying in motion because sooner or later t...”

“Laughing made me feel safe. I was not going to be enveloped by the seediness that coated this world like dust.”

“When you begin to losing your audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.”

“As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever ...”

“Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn't happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?”

“Your technique means nothing if you're not using your talents for the betterment of humanity.”

“There is no greater power than that of a laugh and happiness is a force which can save a person from the horrors of the world.”

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”

“If someone were to harm my family or a friend or somebody I love, I would eat them. I might end up in jail for 500 years, but I would eat them.”

“Sometimes you know you've got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasn't so messed up, it wouldn't be like that. If the world was normal, a girl being nice to you...”

“Smirking, he says, "Whatever spell you just tried to cast on me, it didn't work, so I think you need to go back to Hogwarts.”