“"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.”

“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.”

“… when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.”

“Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.”

“You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.”

“I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground… And so are you. So are we all.”

“If you talk to the shadows,
at least you know them well
and the words, all of them,
unfold themselves with ease
on muddled walls and streets,
when dusk comes on.”

“I hate polite conversation. I hate it when people stand around and go, 'Hi, how are you?' I hate words that don't have any reason or meaning. Also I hate it when people smoke in elevators and closed in places. It's just so rude.”

“Is it a form of social play that underneath the words people say, there is a different conversation going on?”

“Wall Street is the only place that people ride to work in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.”

“All of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the brain as higher level, or system features. It's about as mysterious as the liquidity of water, right? The liquidity is not an extra juice squirted out by the H2O molecules, it's a condition that the system is in; and just as the jar full of water can go from a liquid to solid, depending on the behavior of the molecules, so your brain can go from a state of being conscious to a state of being unconscious, depending on the behavior of the molecules. The famous mind body problem is that simple.”