Kyril Bonfiglioli Quotes

• 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.
• 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:we're going to push him out of a window. Your bedroom window, I think. Yes, and we'll 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 policemen's 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.
• 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?
• 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.
• 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.
• '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'.
• To be on foot in the United States is only immoral, not illegal.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Sleep slunk up like a black panther and sank its kindly fangs into what remained of the Mortdecai brain.
• Fate's fickle finger was feeling for my fundament.
• I have this heavy addiction to life and I'm told that the withdrawal symptoms are shocking.

kyril bonfiglioli