You don’t get too far talking to Laurie. Sometimes I think the flutter in her heart is really in her brain.

More from Brighton Beach Memoirs

• How am I going to become a writer if I don't know how to suffer? Actually, I'd give up writing if I could see a naked girl while I was eating ice cream.
• She wants me to write quietly. If that was the only sentence I published in my memoirs, it would be a bestseller.
• Why don't you just say you lost the money? You had a hole in your pocket. You can tear a hole in your pocket.
• 24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day, coincedence? I think not.
• A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
• Above all, do not fail to give good dinners, and to pay attention to the women.