Kyril Bonfiglioli - Mortdecai

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To be on foot in the United States is only immoral, not illegal.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
He had made one mistake in an otherwise flawless performance: he hadn't told me his name. Have you ever exchanged three words with an American without being told his name?

Kyril Bonfiglioli
"Goodness," I babbled, "but how awful for you. Not drinking, I mean. I mean, imagine getting up in the morning knowing that you're not going to feel any better all day".

Kyril Bonfiglioli
I could almost hear him scrabbling about in his brain for a deft, light opening. His Oscar Wilde touch. Martland has only two personalities – Wilde and Eeyore.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
"No no, Jock…we're going to push him out of a window. Your bedroom window, I think. Yes, and we'll undress him first and say that he was making advances to you and jumped out of the window in a frenzy of thwarted love."
"I say, Charlie, really, what a filthy rotten idea; I mean, think of my wife."
"I never think of policemen's wives, their beauty maddens me like wine."

Kyril Bonfiglioli
The cold pork in the fridge was wilting at the edges; it and I exchanged looks of mutual contempt, like two women wearing the same hat in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
Fate's fickle finger was feeling for my fundament.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
Ten minutes later I was in an enormous taxi-cab, an air-conditioned one, hired for the day for fifty dollars; it seems an awful lot, I know, but money's worth awfully little over there, you'd be surprised. It's because there's so much of it, you see.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
The coffee having arrived (how hard it is to write without the ablative absolute!) we guzzled genteelly for a while...

Kyril Bonfiglioli
Somewhere in the trash he reads Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
Sleep slunk up like a black panther and sank its kindly fangs into what remained of the Mortdecai brain.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
It was still only nine o'clock when I set off on the last leg of my journey, feeling old and dirty and incapable. You probably know the feeling if you are over eighteen.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
"You would now be an enemy, in the third class, of my own organization."
"Only third class?" I asked in the indignant tones which Queen Victoria surely used when she received the Abyssinian Order of Chastity, Second Class.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
I have this heavy addiction to life and I'm told that the withdrawal symptoms are shocking.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
It will be a sad day for the world when the Oriental gent realizes that Western bumbling is only Eastern guile in a different idiom. Well, a lot of it, anyway.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
A moral coward, you see, is simply someone who has read the fine print on the back of his Birth Certificate and seen the little clause which says "You can't win."

Kyril Bonfiglioli
I don't much care about tea-drinking in the afternoon; in the morning the stuff Jock brings to me in bed is like that Nepenthe which the wife of Thone gave to Jove-born Helena, but in the p. m. it always makes me think of Ganges mud in which crocodiles have been coupling.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
Why do people build houses to keep the climate out, then cut holes in the walls to let it in again? I shall never understand.

Kyril Bonfiglioli