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'What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?
   You shut down for the night and go home to your wife, right? You have a martini, order dinner. You read or watch television.
   You are Brueghel's tiny Icarus, drowning unnoticed in a corner of a vast canvas on which men till fields and tend sheep.'

"Groff is new to you, right?"
   "Yeah. He's not actually officially one of my artists yet. We're trying each other out."
   Never lie to these people. They hate, above all, being deceived by the help.'

'The train from Grand Central to Greenwich runs through a morass of exurbia that, let's just say, one would want to conceal from a visiting extraterrestrial. ...The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg would not be entirely out of place here.'

"...He's having dinner with a friend. Some girl he used to know."
   "Are we . . . . concerned about that?"
   "We're a little concerned about everything. He seems slightly funny to me this time."
   He's doing drugs again, Rebecca. Peter Harris, tell your wife that her little brother is back on drugs. Do it now.
   "Funnier than usual?" he asks.

'Peter tried to murder his brother only once, which, by the standards of brothers, is modest. He was seven, which would have made Matthew ten.'

'Peter lets himself into the loft. Quarter past four. He goes to the kitchen counter, puts down the drugstore bag that contains the Excedrin and dental floss he's picked up (why is it so impossible to go out in New York without buying something?), slips off his jacket, hangs it up.'