The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.

On Wall Street, the lawyers play the same role as medics in war: They come in after the shooting is over to clean up the mess.

We want to empower the doctors and patients to get all the other assholes out of the way,' Clark had once told me, then laughed. 'Except for us. One asshole in the middle.

I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.

I appreciate this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to fuck me?

It was one of the fringe benefits of living for so many years essentially alienated from the world around him; He could easily believe that he was right and the world was wrong.