Kyril Bonfiglioli

"Somewhere in the trash he reads Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun."

"I could almost hear him scrabbling about in his brain for a deft, light opening. His Oscar Wilde touch. Martland has only two personalities – Wilde and Eeyore."

"No no, Jock…were going to push him out of a window. Your bedroom window, I think. Yes, and well undress him first and say that he was making advances to you and jumped out of the window in a frenzy of thwarted love." "I say, Charlie, really, what a filthy rotten idea; I mean, think of my wife." "I never think of policemens wives, their beauty maddens me like wine."

"Why do people build houses to keep the climate out, then cut holes in the walls to let it in again? I shall never understand."

"The coffee having arrived (how hard it is to write without the ablative absolute!) we guzzled genteelly for a while..."

"Ten minutes later I was in an enormous taxi-cab, an air-conditioned one, hired for the day for fifty dollars; it seems an awful lot, I know, but moneys worth awfully little over there, youd be surprised. Its because theres so much of it, you see."

"To be on foot in the United States is only immoral, not illegal."

"He had made one mistake in an otherwise flawless performance: he hadnt told me his name. Have you ever exchanged three words with an American without being told his name?"

"It was still only nine oclock when I set off on the last leg of my journey, feeling old and dirty and incapable. You probably know the feeling if you are over eighteen."

"I dont much care about tea-drinking in the afternoon; in the morning the stuff Jock brings to me in bed is like that Nepenthe which the wife of Thone gave to Jove-born Helena, but in the p.m. it always makes me think of Ganges mud in which crocodiles have been coupling."

"The cold pork in the fridge was wilting at the edges; it and I exchanged looks of mutual contempt, like two women wearing the same hat in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot."

"You would now be an enemy, in the third class, of my own organization." "Only third class?" I asked in the indignant tones which Queen Victoria surely used when she received the Abyssinian Order of Chastity, Second Class."