Favorite quotes and excerpts from “Crooked Little Vein,” by Warren Ellis:
By Sunday, I’d moved into the Z Hotel, where the doormen dress like ninjas and stab passing poor people in the neckbits with wooden swords.
I pistol-whipped a tailor once to gain the trust of a disturbed white boy who believed himself to contain the soul of Huey P. Newton.
Cab Driver: Every time I turn on the TV, it’s like Jones, Freelance Whitey. Because only middle-aged white guy detectives can fuck shit up, you know what I’m saying?
Bob: You East Coast types – you’re like little weakass colonies on the edge of Real America, you know that? This is the big country, and we need big cars, and the space for ‘em. This sidewalk thing, it just means we ain’t too proud to make things a little easier for our visiting cousins from Weakass Country. We’re big people like that.
Mike: You’re from fucking Minneapolis.
I reached for beer like a drowning man. Not that drowning men tend to want beer. You know what I mean.
With my lighter held within his halo of vodka fumes, he slowly withdrew an envelope. It looked like he’d been doodling on the back of it at some point. On closer inspection, it appeared he’d been practicing his alphabet.
Chief of Staff: California’s not fit for humans. Whole goddamned state should be sawed off the mainland and floated off to the Pacific. We’ll get to that, mark my words. Except for Disneyland. I like Disneyland. We’ll keep Disneyland. Staple it onto the end of Arizona or something.
I wanted cigarettes and pemmican and to be James Bond. Instead, I was sweating myself to death in the trunk of a lawyer’s car en route to Beverly Hills.
I moved along the space like the world’s most retarded crab, trying to keep the map straight in my head.
