I don't like grim filth. I like funny filth.

I don't believe in sweeping social change being manifested by one person, unless he has an atomic weapon.

They like him for the simplest of reasons: One of them said to me, 'Because he's funny,'

There was no national secrets, no national security secrets. There were no defense secrets or confidential information that was provided to anyone on the Cuban side of the equation.

The Puffer Fish: Wherein the author flaunts his vocabulary.

His father was IRA and his mother was Quebecois, and they had reliquished their mortal coils in the internecine conflagration that ended their conjoined separatist movement, IRA-Q. The appellation he was given by his progenitors was Ray O'Vaque ("Like the battery," he'd elucidate, with an adamantine stare that proscribed any mirth). In his years of incarceration, however, he had earned the sobriquet "Uncle Milty" for his piscine amatory habits.
He had been emancipated from the penitentiary for three weeks, and now his restless peregrinations had conveyed him to this liminal place, seeking compurgation in the permafrost of the hyperborean tundra, which was an apt analogue of the permafrost in his heart. He insinuated himself into the caravansary with nugatory expectations, which were confirmed by the exiguous provisions for comfort. But then the bartender looked up from laving the begrimed bar, his eyes growing luminous as he ejactulated, "Milt!

People who are funny and smart and return phone calls get much better press than people who are just funny and smart.