1. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. ’Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?

  2. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and the time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and I thought, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be . . . when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.

3. A diamond is hard and rough to the touch.

  4. Nothing’s planted. I don’t have a thing in the ground.

  5. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine … A salesman is got to dream, boy.