Quotes from Richard Condon

I'm a man of the marketplace as well as an artist. I'm a pawnbroker of myth.

Mason took in enough cannabis smoke to allow a Lipan Apache manipulating a blanket over it to transmit the complete works of Tennyson.

Raymond stood as though someone might have just opened a beach umbrella in his bowels.

Amateur psychiatric prognosis can be fascinating when there is absolutely nothing else to do.

Iselin is a man who shall forever stand guard at the door of the mind to protect the people of this great nation from facts.

So saved are all those who enable themselves to believe, and therefore was the military mind called a juvenile mind. It was constant; it observed a code of honor in a world where any element of devotion to a rationale summoned scorn but the world itself knew itself was sick.

Without the consciousness of guilt, existence had become so bland in Paradise that Eve welcomed the pungency of Original Sin.

Her ambition was an extremely distressing condition. She sought power the way a superstitious man might look for a four-leaf clover.

Senator Jordan's only response had been made upon a single mimeographed sheet holding a single sentence. Distributed to all press agencies, it said: "How long will you let this man use you and trick you?" Senator

He felt the sadness of Lucifer.

How can I continue to live, he shouted at high scream under the nave of his encompassing skull,

Raymond also distrusted all other living people because they had not warned his father of his mother.

The resentful man is a human with the capacity for affection so poorly developed that his understanding for the motives of others very nearly does not exist.

The sergeant's account of his past was ancient in its form and confusingly dramatic, as perhaps would have been a game of three-level chess between Richard Burbage and Sacha Guitry.

LET US STOP IMITATING!!! Piracy and imitations of designs hamper the development and expansion of export trade. It is regrettable that there are quite a few cases of piracy in the People's Republic. Piracy injures the Chinese people's international prestige, causes the boycott of Chinese goods, and makes Chinese designers lose interest in making creative efforts.

The conception of people acting against their own best interests should not startle us. We see it occasionally in sleep-walking and in politics, every day.

Then he had beaten her with a hockey stick because he had objected to her nailing the paw of a beige cocker spaniel to the floor because the dog was stubborn and refused to understand the most elemental instructions to remain still when she had called out the command to do so.

She would lie in the darkness and hear the rain, then hear her father's soft, soft step rising on the stairs after he had slipped the bolt into the lock of the attic door, and she would slip out of her long woolen night dress and wait for the warmth of him and the wonder of him.

Michelangelo had said that the successful completion of a great mosaic must rest upon the infinite design in the placement of a single tile.

Raymond's mother's subtraction of 79 cases from 286 cases left 207 cases, the number with which she had had Johnny kick off. She had made one other small change. The Secretary's actual language had been "recommendation against permanent employment," which she had changed to read: "members of the Communist party," which Johnny had adjusted to read: "card-carrying Communists.

Who killed Jocie, Ben?"—and Marco could not answer him. "Ben, did I—did I kill Jocie? That could be, couldn't it? Maybe it was an accident, but they wanted me to kill Senator Jordan and—did I kill my Jocie?

The apartment was on the sixteenth floor. It was old-fashioned, which meant that the rooms were large and light-filled, the ceilings high enough to permit a constant circulation of air, and the walls thick enough for a man and his loving wife to have a stimulating argument at the top of their lungs without invading the nervous systems of surrounding neighbors. Raymond had rented the apartment furnished and nothing in the place beyond the books, the records, and the phonograph was his.

It's just a piece of land and a lot of lawyers. We have to create something of value on the land—design it and see it built. That's all that matters.

Do you mind cigar smoke," he mumbled. "Not at all," she murmured. He turned away from her but made no move to find a cigar. "Go ahead," she said. "As a matter of fact, I wish you'd smoke two cigars at the same time." "You must really like cigar smoke." "Not especially, but I think two cigars going at the same time would look awfully amusing.