18 quotes
Sleep slunk up like a black panther and sank its kindly fangs into what remained of the Mortdecai brain.
After You With The Pistol (1979)
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.
Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972)
I have this heavy addiction to life and I'm told that the withdrawal symptoms are shocking.
After You With The Pistol (1979)
It will be a sad day for the world when the Oriental gent realizes that Western bumbling is only Eastern guile in a different idiom. Well, a lot of it, anyway.
After You With The Pistol (1979)
To be on foot in the United States is only immoral, not illegal.
Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972)
The coffee having arrived (how hard it is to write without the ablative absolute!) we guzzled genteelly for a while...
Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972)
Fate's fickle finger was feeling for my fundament.
After You With The Pistol (1979)
A mouth wash, half a dexedrine, a morsel of anchovy toast and a Charvet dressing-gown — all in the order named — ...
Mortdecai's Endgame (1973)
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.
Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972)
A moral coward, you see, is simply someone who has read the fine print on the back of his Birth Certificate and seen the little clause which says "You can't win."
Something Nasty in the Woodshed (1976)
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.
Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972)
He had made one mistake in an otherwise flawless performance: he hadn't told me his name. Have you ever exchanged three words with an American without being told his name?
Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972)
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.
After You With The Pistol (1979)
It was still only nine o'clock 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.
Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972)
You will learn nothing of importance from this story except, perhaps, how to die; but then, you were born knowing that and in any case it only has to be done once. It is easy: ask anyone who has done it.
All the Tea in China (1978)
"Goodness," I babbled, "but how awful for you. Not drinking, I mean. I mean, imagine getting up in the morning knowing that you're not going to feel any better all day".
Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972)
I don't 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.
After You With The Pistol (1979)
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 money's worth awfully little over there, you'd be surprised. It's because there's so much of it, you see.
Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972)