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Everyone always respects a guy who’s dealing with personal stuff.
where there are great monuments to regal expenditure, there are hotels.
Cleaning a room is an extension of cleaning a body; changing its furniture as well as its clothes.
Ritual makes murder easier; it is something else to concentrate on.
Amazing, the indignant pride people invest in natural processes. Astonishing, how deeply vanity is ingrained.
Having inhabited almost every size, shape and form of body you can possibly imagine, the only conclusions are these: exercise when you’re still young enough to appreciate it, look after your spine, and if you have the option, use an electric toothbrush.”
“A story. That is all that the lives of other men ever are – a tale told about another. Including mine. It is the only trace we leave behind, quickly reported with the details blurred, soon forgotten.”
Gone are the days when I would bury a rich man’s money beneath a secluded tree, to return to it in a poor man’s body when time came to move on; now the tree is the world, and the earth is automated.
Even secret bunkers of murderous men need to order toilet paper in bulk. Even murderers run out of rubber bands.
Paris. What may I say of Paris? That the French never take no for an answer.
To me Paris is a beautiful place to spend May, June and September, hideous in August, drab in February and at its most magical when the drains are opened to wash away yesterday’s dirt, turning the city streets into a roaring fountain.
In the old days our fathers dreamed of bringing liberty and prosperity to the whole of the human race, of building a perfect society, and somehow that became a dream of a bigger car and a bigger front window and our neighbours making apple pie, apple fucking pie. And we bought into it, the whole fucking country, we bought into it, and we’re proud because our lawns are neat and our houses are warm in winter and cool in summer and – fuck!”
“We’re happy because we’re too fucking scared, too fucking lazy to think of anything better to be.”
The idea that love has to be a blazing romantic thing of monogamous stability is innately ludicrous. You loved your parents, perhaps, because they were the warmth you could flee to. You loved your first childhood crush with a passion that made your lips tingle, your flesh grow light in their presence. You loved your wife with the steadiness of an ocean against the shore; your lover with the blaze of a shooting star, your best friend with the confidence of a mountain. Love is a many-splendoured thing, as the old song says.
