Quotes from Richard Kadrey

I'd rather watch you do the backstroke in lava.

An angel wouldn't know fun if it showed up in a blimp with dancing girls and a full bar.

Dan Perkins is in a silk shirt and pants with the sleeves rolled up. Business casual. He has gray hair and slightly funny eyes. Really, he looks less like a businessman than a gray-haired anthropology professor who's dipped into the school's ayahuasca supply one too many times.

If you play cards with the dead, make sure you deal and don't let them buy you drinks. They'll slip you a formaldehyde roofie and pry the gold fillings out of your teeth.

I promise you eternal torment if you do not deliver to me a chocolate brownie.

Juliette Stray is a bleach-blond Mamie Van Doren knockoff. She kisses cheeks left and right as she moves through the crowd. A big smile masks someone trying to look way too nice for it to be anything but protective coloring—like the pretty stripes on a coral snake. Better keep an eye on her. If things go bad, she'll be the one who puts the knife in.

I say, "The Elmer Gantry act is very convincing, but why pretend you're Wormwood? That doesn't make any sense.

Wells points at me like P. T. Barnum showing off the dog-faced boy to the masses.

There's nothing I could have done about it then and there's nothing I can do about it now and that's what I have to live with. Maybe that right there is the definition of life. Being alive is learning how to live with the intolerable.

And I wish whoever chooses the spots for these ceremonies could quit the Bela Lugosi bullshit. It's always a crypt. It's always a cemetery or a spooky old mansion where a family was murdered by a serial killer or angry Girl Scouts when they didn't buy enough cookies.

I knock on the door and Flicker yells, "Come in." It's dark inside. The only illumination comes from an old Philco Predicta TV. She's watching The Tingler with someone or something else. I mean, it's person shaped but completely black. No face or anything else. It's like a kind of human void next to her on the battered red sofa.

I should walk away from everything? Become a monk, watch movies, grow old, and complain about the old days when we had real movies and not 3-D holograms? I hate 3-D almost as much as I hate soup.

When we get there I say, "If anyone says you ran, point them out and I'll hit them." She grabs my arm. "I don't need you to fight my battles for me." "I'm not fighting for you. I just like punching people.

I look at her bandaged hands. "You all right?" "Just a couple of blisters. Some asshole convinced me to run through a furnace." "He sounds shady. As your lawyer, I advise you to avoid him in the future." "It's my fondest dream.

The only stop I make is on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. I throw the road rage pistol far out into the water. Let the fish have it. They have more sense than some people, including me.

If you shot time in the gut, this is where it would crawl off to die.

I hurt like I just climbed out of a cement mixer, and the shot that grazed my side burns like hell. But I don't have time to whine right now.

Look on the bright side. You didn't bleed all over my clean floor," Kasabian says. "Your floor was always my utmost concern.

One rule of thumb in fighting is that crazy can often overcome skill and numbers, because, while a trained fighter might actually enjoy going up against another trained fighter, no one really wants to wrestle with crazy. Crazy doesn't know when it's winning. And crazy doesn't know when to stop. If you can't pull off crazy, if, for instance, you're handcuffed in a small van with six armed assailants, stupid is a decent substitute for crazy.

That's how you know someone really likes you. Anyone can give you chocolate and flowers, but when they'll disembowel someone for you? That's true love.

I pull the cork and pour a glass full. Give it a sniff. There it is. The heady bouquet of gasoline and hot pepper. I sip it and shudder a little. It burns just right going down.

I've been me for so long, what am I going to be if that's gone?

You're saying you're a better person than me?" Kasabian thinks about it. "Yeah. That's exactly what I'm saying." "Then let's drink to that.

That's it, fuckers. I've saved your dumb asses more than once. Let me choke you a little as I vanish into the sky.