Paul Murray

I do not think my life would make a very interesting book,' I say. 'I feel I can speak with a certain amount of authority here.

THE ACCURSED SHIP didn__ sink for a full three hours. By the time it did, I was feeling so traumatized that even watching Dogface die offered little consolation. The dialogue, the acting, the vast emptiness of the whole endeavor! Was that what passed for cinema these days? I felt like I had been violated; violated by a team of accountants. Laura, prostrated by grief, lay weeping on my lap. Frank stared stolidly at the credits, over which, as a coup de grâce, a cat or cats were being strangled to the effect that __y Heart Will Go On,_ which at this moment in time was not a sentiment I could endorse.

I__ just saying that once that have an excuse, people will do anything. They do what they are told, and they take their money and they think it__ all okay because it__ just their job, while their real self is what happens after work, when they__e bouncing a baby on the knee, or writing poems about snowflakes or whatever.

So this is the boom, eh?_ I said. __ot exactly Scott Fitzgerald, is it?_ ____l tell you what it__ like,_ he said glumly. __t__ like being in Caligula__ Rome, and everyone around you__ having an orgy, and you__e the mug stuck looking after the horse._ He pulled heavily on his cigarette. __he whole thing__l come crashing down,_ he said bleakly, __nd all anyone__l have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese.

None of us mentioned An Evening of Long Goodbyes, whose race had been so catastrophic that, by the end, neither Frank nor I could summon the will to gloat. He had begun badly, getting his head stuck in the gate and having to be extricated by the stewards, and continued with a series of humiliating and distinctly uncanine trips and stumbles, disgracing himself beyond redemption in the third lap, when his muzzle came off and, to the boos of the crowd, he abandoned the race to leap over the hoardings and snatch a hot dog from the hand of a small boy.

I don__ see Number Four though__h._ Number Four, wearing an unflattering chartreuse jacket, was sitting alone on the chewed-up grass, despondently licking his testicles. __mm, I don__ know, Bel . .

I don__ mind crack,_ I said. __ like crack as much as the next man. But it__ not doing a thing for my nerves, and I already have a splitting headache_ I say, I don__ suppose those heroin dealers carry Anadin or acetaminophen or anything like that, do they?_ __ think they just have heroin, Charlie.

Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, it's our own expectations that crush us.

Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, it's our own expectations that crush us." -- from Skippy Dies

If you do it in the bookies, it's a bet. . . . If you pay some 23-year-old in an Armani suit two hundred grand to go to the window for you, it's a derivative.

Capitalism needs war.

You always were such a worrier. It was as if you thought your worrying was all that held the world together, and if you stopped for a split second the whole thing would just fly apart.

It used to be the smartest people didn't always want to be the richest people.

Life is a precious commodity, Charles. It__ time you achieved your full potential and learned the true value of things._ __ou__e talking like a Stalinist!_ I cried. __eople don__ get jobs to achieve things and learn values! They do it because they have to, and then they use whatever__ left over to buy themselves nice things that make them feel less bad about having jobs!

The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.

Maybe instead of strings it's stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that's why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people's we know, until you've got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word....

People don't want the truth,' he says, waving a hand at the streets around us. 'They want better-quality lies. High definition lies on fifty-inch screens.

I believe his lies, so he believes mine.' She turns and looks at me straight on. 'That's how it goes at the end of love.