“I won the only duel I ever lost.”

“A duel, a duel, a duel. Is there anything more exciting, more romantic… or more utterly moronic?”

“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”

“I challenge you to a duel!” screamed the cat, sailing over their heads on the swinging chandelier.”

“I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel.”

“I don't duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange. If I decide you die, you will die when I choose, where I choose, by what means I choose, and you will never see the blow coming. (…) I don't duel. But if you seek to die like a bludgeoned steer, cross me again.”

“There's a perpetual duel going on between the world of the spirit and the world of things. Although the one only has meaning in relation to the other.”

“On the diamond, I had been rough on Babe. I'd never taken my spurs out of his hide and one day he'd come looking for me in the Detroit clubhouse with fistic mayhem in mind. We'd won and lost duels to each other way back since 1915, when Babe had been a rookie pitcher with Bill Carrigan's Boston Red Sox. To add heat to the situation, some press association or other was always holding a poll to pick between Ruth and Cobb as the all-time star player.”

“Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool.”

“The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.”