The Gold Coast

by Nelson DeMille

The Gold Coast is also the book that has received the most favorable and thoughtful reviews of all my books,

book that readers read more than once,

genteel world of upper-class society as it existed and still exists on Long Island’s fabled Gold Coast. This is a world of money, mansions, manners, and mores, and into this world I introduced the Mafia.

She is a strikingly beautiful woman, if I may be uxorious for a moment.

But then restraint is a condition of our era with its dwindling supply of nearly everything vital to life. Restraint was not what the Roaring Twenties was about.

I know that years ago, it was understood that one sort of people went to the early service, and the other sort of people to the later one.

The Carolinas seem to have become a respectable retirement destination, as opposed to Florida, most of which is considered by people around here as unfit for human habitation.

This is not California, where your car accounts for fifty percent of your personality.

I suppose if you worship money, then like an ancient Hebrew who may not pronounce the name of God, no one in this temple will ever pronounce the word dollars.

Not only is it true that the rich do not pay their bills promptly, but when they do finally pay, they like to decide for themselves how much they owe.

I shouldn’t have had the fourth or fifth martini. Actually, the fifth was okay. It was the fourth I shouldn’t have had.

Susan is sometimes so distant I have to dial an area code to get through to her.

Finding out that you didn’t care about things you used to care about was all well and good, but the next step was trying to find out what you did care about.

‘Why shouldn’t I give half my money to the American people? I got all of it from them.’” I smiled. “That’s very progressive.”

When you cheat at poker, life, or taxes, you’ve taken the honor and fun out of winning, and ultimately you’ve cheated yourself out of the finest pleasure in life: beating the other guy fair and square.

“People who don’t pay any taxes, the real tax evaders, appear to live like the old robber barons. But I assure you, eventually they go to jail. There is justice.”

I sipped on a gin and tonic, my summer drink, made with real Schweppes quinine to ward off malaria, and real Boodles gin to ward off reality.

Communism was dead, and American capitalism had a bad cough.

people with time and money on their hands often need something to get their blood moving.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “Never interrupt an enemy while he’s making a mistake.”