Parents: so essential, yet sometimes likesomething you've stepped in and cannot get off your shoe. What else is there but to love them?
As we followed him down a hall to a back bedroom, he told us that he owned the house. Unfortunately, it’s not haunted, he said.
Americans so dearly love to be fooled. —Charles Baudelaire
Hanging out with you is like an extra job.
Romance, said Antony. A con so crazy that by the time the bullet's in the chamber, you don't know if you've taken someone or you've been taken.
He was a good con man, but not a great con man. He wasn't ruthless enough. He had all the tricks, all the techniques, the facility for it. That part if you'll excuse the expression, was in his blood....
This was a new type of Klan. They were still race haters, but they sold themselves to the populace on the platform of law and order. Imagine. There weren’t enough colored people out there on the islan...
I thought of a line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.
Illegal' takes on a whole new meaning when you're loaded like Barnes. The rich have a separate rule book. To them if it makes money, it can't be wrong.
No one gives a shit if you write a book or not.
As Schell had taught me, a con starts when there is something you want and you are blocked from attaining it by certain obstacles. The good con artist elicits the assistance of those who mean to stand...
To our benefit, death isn't affected by an economic failure, and it never takes a holiday. In addition, a bereaved rich man is easier to con than a poor one in the same condition. A poor man, straight...
Simplicity and subtlety make for the best con. A distraction should lead the mark's attention upward, either toward the sky or to some better vision of himself. Color signals danger. Try to appear to...
May God be everywhere you are about to look and absent where you already have.
I hold no preconceived prejudice against anyone, he'd said, because to do so is utter folly for someone in my line of work. It's only ignorance that causes individuals to label an entire race as eithe...
Even the streetcars moved at a more languorous pace, like great serpents swimming through a darkness made thick by the cast-off regrets of the day. I forestalled answering my own question by stopping...
I’d like to ask you a question, if I may.What?All these poems you’ve written and hidden—so many poems. Why?While she thought, morning broke and the birds sang in the garden. Because I could not stop.
It’s every man for himself, he said, and went back to reading. After my mother had died and he’d been laid off from his machinist job over in Milton, he’d retreated into near silence and the print rea...