“Mike could see the fellow cooked and ate and sat on a sofa and put his feet up on the table it magazines. Mike didn't care which ones the fellow subscribed to, because Mike had subscribed to the fellow.”

“A visiting pastor at our church in Plains once told a story about a priest from New Orleans. Father Flanagan’s parish lay in the central part of the city, close to many taverns. One night he was walking down the street and saw a drunk thrown out of a pub. The man landed in the gutter, and Father Flanagan quickly recognized him as one of his parishioners, a fellow named Mike. Father Flanagan shook the dazed man and said, “Mike!” Mike opened his eyes and Father Flanagan said, “You’re in trouble. If there is anything I can do for you, please tell me what it is.ℍ “Well, Father,” Mike replied, “I hope you’ll pray for me.” “Yes,” the priest answered, “I’ll pray for you right now.” He knelt down in the gutter and prayed, “Father, please have mercy on this drunken man.ℍ At this, a startled Mike woke up fully and said, “Father, please don’t tell God I’m drunk.ℍ Sometimes we don’t feel much of a personal relationship between God and ourselves, as though we have a secret life full of failures and sins that God knows nothing about. We want to involve God only when we plan to give thanks or when we’re in trouble and need help. But the rest of our lives, we’d rather keep to ourselves.”

“When a twelfth-century youth fell in love he did not take three paces backward, gaze into her eyes, and tell her she was too beautiful to live. He said he would step outside and see about it. And if, when he got out, he met a man and broke his head—the other man's head, I mean—then that proved that his—the first fellow's—girl was a pretty girl. But if the other fellow broke his head—not his own, you know, but the other fellow's—the other fellow to the second fellow, that is, because of course the other fellow would only be the other fellow to him, not the first fellow who—well, if he broke his head, then his girl—not the other fellow's, but the fellow who was the—Look here, if A broke B's head, then A's girl was a pretty girl; but if B broke A's head, then A's girl wasn't a pretty girl, but B's girl was. That was their method of conducting art criticism.”

“Do you subscribe to the Weekly Standard? Does that magazine hate America?”

“This is about getting into a corporation, screwing it up, putting in poison pills so your competitor can’t swallow it…. Very intricate game played in the 1980’s…. Mike Milken did it with junks bonds, Drexel Burnham.”

“They had left him for dead in the middle of a pool of blood in his own bedroom, his belly slit open like gaping barn doors, the hilt of the knife wedged against his sternum. But the only trouble was that he had stayed alive somehow, his life pumping out, managing to knock the telephone off the little table and dial me. Now he was looking up at me with seconds left and all he could do was force out the words, "Mike …there was no reason."”

“I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics. Stan could write on three typewriters at once! I wrote the Human Torch, Submariner. I worked my way down. I started off at the high level, in the slick magazines, but they didn't use my name, they used house names. Anyway, then I went downhill to the pulps, then downhill further to the comics. I went downhill class-wise, but I went uphill, money-wise! I was making more money in the comics. I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.”

“The sound was essentially background sound, myself, and Carl, Dennis and Al Jardine, Mike was our lead singer. The four of us put our voices together. We had done it really beautifully. We had a beautiful blend. We really did.”

“Young fellows will be young fellows.”

“222. One graine fills not a sacke, but helpes his fellowes.”