“Once you asked me about crime nowadays - I said any such interest pathological - maybe prompted by the endless sickening television programmes of your time - never able to watch more than few minutes myself... disgusting!”

“You watch television much?” Padillo asked.
“Some,” I said. “It’s like China. If you ignore it, it just gets worse.”

“She let herself love me for three minutes.
Can three minutes last forever? I ask myself, but already know the answer.
Probably not, I reply. But maybe they last long enough.”

“Television is to news as a bumper sticker is to Shakespeare. I remember hearing an analogy once that went something like that. Your typical nightly, 35-minute TV news broadcast is a headline service with pictures. Five minutes of police-blotter reporting - fires, murders, car accidents, etc. - five minutes of human-interest stories and small talk, five minutes of weather, five minutes of sports, ten minutes of commercials, and maybe a minute or two for business, science, politics, and affairs of the world.”

“I cannot keep a clock or a watch. They stop on me. Why won't time stay peacefully on my wrist? Is time not interested in me any more because I am dying?”

“Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”

“To succeed in your mission, you must have single-minded devotion to your goal. Individuals like myself are often called 'workaholics'. I question this term because that implies a pathological condition or an illness. If I do what I desire more than anything else in the world and which makes me happy, such work can never be an aberration.”

“You can do so much in ten minutes’ time. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. Divide your life into 10-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.”

“Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours, and nothing is fabulous any more.”

“Instead, I watch myself get shot on television.”