When you're feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you aren't thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week.

The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you're fussing that he's tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope.

I wondered what you'd have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?

The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?

Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe.

I'd always had a guilty preference for fiction. Since I seemed now to be living fiction, this proved to have been an entirely reasonable choice.

Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you.Can I trust him?What do I have to lose?

What this world doesn't have is the three-wishes, go-to-the-ball-and-meet-your-prince, happily-ever-after kind of magic. We have all the mangling and malevolent kinds. Who *invented* this system?

You can be a really nasty, selfish little jerk when you're scared enough. I was scared enough.

The most serious drawback to the telling-nothing approach is that it made that much more of a mystery of what had happened, and the nature of gossip abhors a vacuum of the unexplained.

There are always cats around Charlie's, but they are usually refugees seeking asylum from the local rat population, and rather desperately friendly.

Have you ever started to wave at someone and then realized they weren’t really waving at you, so you abort and go for a head scratch instead? That’s how I felt.

You might pass by those who're stuck in the bottle neck while you are swimming in your whiskey, be kind !

My fundamental interests are to preserve the good name and standing of this Australian Labor Party and to act in the national interest on behalf of the Australian Government.

I never knew I had the power to hurt him, only that he possessed the power to hurt me.

Films should be for everybody.

Elvis Presley's music never meant anything to me. Mambo was the music I loved - it spoke to me.

I think we live in a very competitive world, and I love competition.

If at first you don't succeed, you may be at your level of incompetence already.

True wisdom for a general is vigorous determination.

You can't let a candidate run for too long. He will be dragged along, cut apart, put back together and ripped to shreds again - from both the political opponents and the media.