“And the walls became the world all around.”

“The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”

“Near about twelve my eyes suddenly opened — I had not opened them. The sleep was broken by something else. I felt a great presence around me in the room. It was a very small room. I felt a throbbing life all around me, a great vibration — almost like a hurricane, a great storm of light, joy, ecstasy. I was drowning in it. It was so tremendously real that everything became unreal. The walls of the room became unreal, the house became unreal, my own body became unreal. Everything was unreal because now there was for the first time reality.”

“Adrian tipped my face up toward his and kissed me. Like always, the world around me stopped moving. No, the world became Adrian, only Adrian.”

“I wanted to explore the new Wall Street. When I was writing Scarface in Miami, there was so much coke around and so many lunatics, and I met so many kids from Wall Street who were millionaires. I thought older men were rich, but here were these kids, 25 or 28 or 35 years old, with millions of dollars playing the markets all over the world around the clock. My father would have been shocked by the new electronics that allowed it…. Dad was a stockbroker on Wall Street when there was more integrity and class.”

“"Liquidity" was one of those words Wall Street people threw around when they wanted the conversation to end, and for brains to go dead, and for all questioning to cease.”

“My father was a pimp before he became a deacon or something. These people know how to handle women. I'm the worst guy in the world with women. They run circles around me.”

“Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.”

“It was around 1910/11 that everyone, at every level of the social scale, became aware of those apparent eccentricities that were challenging the precarious certainties of the world. And it was uniquely the painting of a group, not of an individual, that was the cause.”

“It all began with a shoe on the wall. A shoe on the wall shouldn't be there at all.”