“…so unpopular, if he became a funeral director people would stop dying”

“There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.”

“If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.”

“So you're gonna end this by dying, huh? Stop running away!”

“I remember when hard-core first became commonplace, and there were discussions about what it would be like if a serious director ever made a porn movie. The answer, judging by Anatomy of Hell, is that the audience would decide they did not require such a serious director after all.”

“Come now, don't make such a funeral face. It isn't dying that's sad; it's living when you're not happy.”

“If all people became ghosts my social life would be so over"
- Suze Simon in the Mediator”

“You are thirty minutes late."
"Yes."
"Would you be thirty minutes late to a wedding or a funeral?"
"No."
"Why not, pray tell?"
"Well, if the funeral was mine I'd have to be on time. If the wedding was mine it would be my funeral.”

“If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”

“The first director of Hopkins didn’t get along with him so Ricketts would have to wait until he was out of town to sneak into the library with the help of some sympathetic professor.”