- Merle McGill: I guess it must be hard for you to understand, Inspector, a man like me and Cecil Fox.
- Inspector Rizzi: Not hard at all.
- Merle McGill: But how can I say it, Inspector... He was my first... man. Somehow you just never forget your first man.
- Inspector Rizzi: I remember mine - vividly.
- [Merle throws him a curious glance]
- Inspector Rizzi: He also got away.
- Cecil Fox: Nothing like gold to pass the time. It is even the color of time... Gold. How little most people value time, little people. Like everything else, they will choose what's more, not what's better. Even time, they will pray to live 100, long, miserable years and feel cheated if they had say 50 of the best. Quantity yes, quality no. Venice is tiny and precious. Los Angeles is gigantic and terrifying. Who wants it? Most people, that's who. There's good time and bad time, you know, the clocks don't give a damn what time they measure. We do. We special ones. We slow down for the good. We sip it second by second like great wine. We speed up the bad. The little people, chumps, swallow time like hamburger. One hundred years of well done hamburger, they will all settle for that. If I were to tell you that for me, the next 10 minutes of my life will be fuller and richer than the next 10 years for any chump in London, Paris, Rome, New York, or Bangkok, would you know what the hell I was talking about?
- Sarah Watkins: [when asked about her lovelife] Truthfully, there isn't a man whose face I can remember.
- Cecil Fox: [after Nurse Watkins pulls her legs up into the dumbwaiter] Legs like those on a voice of morality. As unrewarding as the lower half of a mermaid.
- William McFly: And there's a hot rumor you've got money problems.
- Merle McGill: There's a hot rumor Sophia Loren's a boy.
- William McFly: What are you trying to prove with all of this?
- Cecil Fox: Why must everything prove something?
- William McFly: Well, there must be something more to it than just fun and games.
- Cecil Fox: Well, you must admit its quite a game - and I promise you the fun's only just starting.
- William McFly: Strange, almost displaced kind of fun. Out of another time, another world.
- Cecil Fox: There's been no other time, really, no other world. We've simply forgotten the pleasure of living in them.
- William McFly: In the 17th Century, for instance, let's say Elizabethan London, when torturing lunatics and animals, bear-baiting was great fun.
- Cecil Fox: Well, for the witless and undemanding, not unlike today's television. The Elizabethan elite, however, for their more exclusive entertainment, baited each other: people-baiting.
- Cecil Fox: I'm not surprised you failed as an actor, your timing has all the sensitivity of a stampeding buffalo.
- Merle McGill: Another thing, Dominque the Queen.
- Cecil Fox: Royalty. Not like us. Not like you and me. Proud of our basic animal emotions. Where we feel, they pretend.
- [embraces Merle]
- Cecil Fox: God, you're basic. You even smell basic. What's that perfume?
- Merle McGill: It comes from the jungle. The natives dip their arrows in it.
- Merle McGill: After all, honesty is the best policy, right?
- Inspector Rizzi: Debatable. But, at the moment I would appreciate it.
- Sarah Watkins: I don't want to sound like a voice for morality, it makes him angry and you angry. But there are some things...
- Cecil Fox: What things?
- Sarah Watkins: Not gold, perhaps, but still precious. Not negotiable, not even legal tender. Just tender.
- Cecil Fox: Love, for example?
- Sarah Watkins: You can't even say it, you poor man, you make it sound like hate.
- William McFly: What will you drink, ladies?
- Mrs. Sheridan: Root beer.
- William McFly: Well, I'm afraid we haven't any...
- Mrs. Sheridan: [cutting him off] Of course not! Billions of dollars exporting the American way of life, and most of the world still never heard of root beer!
- Cecil Fox: Who am I to complain? Others have dead without knowing true gratitude. Others like me: Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler.
- Merle McGill: [seductively] Silly boy! I wouldn't look twice at Hitler.
- Princess Dominique: I have no need for Mr. Fox's money.
- Inspector Rizzi: That is what truly baffles me. This incredible wealth which nobody needs and everybody wants.
- Merle McGill: [seeing the elaborate Renaissance clock on Fox's mantelpiece] That one looks like the old days, when they used to wind the clocks by hand.
- Cecil Fox: At one time it belonged to Lucrezia Borgia.
- Merle McGill: Oh? She give it to ya?
- William McFly: For the English speaking actor, Rome is the elephant's graveyard, when you can't make it or wait it out any longer in New York, Hollywood, or London.
- William McFly: I'm a sometime actor who between engagements does odd jobs. Now, how odd is this job you've got - and what is it?
- Merle McGill: I might need your help here. Anything you can do for me, I'd certainly appreciate.
- William McFly: I'll be sure to keep it in mind, Miss McGill.
- Merle McGill: Make it Merle.
- William McFly: Or even Myrtle?
- Cecil Fox: Lone Star was insatiable. A beautiful bottomless pit. There was never enough of anything: money, possessions, food, sex. I thought I had an exorbitant appetite for that particular pastime, but, Lone Star... Imagine if you can, a 17 year old combined Venus and giant squid.
- Merle McGill: I'm trying very hard.
- Cecil Fox: Four fantastic years it lasted. It wore me ought.
- William McFly: Granted three greedy women believe you're dying. Granted they've swallowed your bait. At what point do you yell April fools?
- Cecil Fox: At the moment I have no particular finish in mind. Do you?
- William McFly: It's your script, Mr. Fox.
- William McFly: For some strange coincidence, both ladies seem to have time on their minds.
- Cecil Fox: So have you and I. So has everyone. It's the one obsession common to all mankind. In the beginning, there was time. Now, after mankind is over or we blow ourselves up or just end, there'll still be time. Have respect for it, McFly.
- Merle McGill: We're way up the creek. You know what that means? Just take my word for it. We've got to come up with a paddle real quick.
- Merle McGill: Mr. Fox, both of those broads are basically after your dough.
- Cecil Fox: And you, Bunny?
- Merle McGill: You know money never meant anything to me.
- Mrs. Sheridan: Is he still with us Sarah?
- Sarah Watkins: He seems to have a very good pulse, Mrs. Sheridan; but, its terribly fast.
- Mrs. Sheridan: Runnin' lickety-split to Judgment Day, that's why.
- Mrs. Sheridan: I hit Cec' once. Not like that - with a four pound T-bone steak. He half killed me. And then we made love. Livin' with him - oh my, the way he went at life, like he wanted to live it minute by minute.
- Cecil Fox: Your profession suits you well, nurse Watkins. You have a bed pan's eye view of life and nature.
- Sarah Watkins: Spare me the modesty of your desires. Piffle! "I like simple things" means usually I can't afford what I want.
- Cecil Fox: Come walk with me in my Elizabethan garden. Take off your low heeled prejudices. Let it grow around you.
- Sarah Watkins: Oh, I don't know what I wish. If only he were more stupid or less stupid. If he could only understand that everybody in the world can't want everything and have everything; because, well then, everything would be worthless.
- Inspector Rizzi: Miss McGill, I understand the necessity of you to arrive in Venice incognito.
- Merle McGill: I wouldn't go anywheres uninvited.
- Inspector Rizzi: I must have used the wrong word. My English is uh... .
- Merle McGill: When you do talk to Princess Dominique, you know what she's gonna tell ya?
- Inspector Rizzi: If I had such capability, I would never get out of bed.
- Merle McGill: She's gonna say that she and I were here, in my room, all night, playing gin rummy together. That'll be a lie. For one thing, she can't even play gin rummy.
- Inspector Rizzi: Fascinating! Now, why would she choose a game she could not play?
- Merle McGill: [with a "caught" look on her face] Yeah, that was stupid of her, but the name of the game isn't important.
- Merle McGill: OK, shamus, so what's on your mind? Or, to be exact, on both your minds?
- Inspector Rizzi: Shamus? You use too many American idioms I do not know.
- Sarah Watkins: I would very much like to sit down. Will you promise not to molest me?
- Cecil Fox: Molest? Makes me sound like something in a public park.
- William McFly: What's she doing in Baden-Baden?
- Cecil Fox: Taking the baths, I presume. Or, giving them. One never can tell.
- Mrs. Sheridan: She didn't come all the way to Venice just to give Cecil Fox her autograph, you can bet your butt.
- Mrs. Sheridan: You get outta here. But, don't leave the house, I just might want to search your luggage.
- Merle McGill: You're not giving any orders yet. Mr. Fox isn't even dead yet.
- Mrs. Sheridan: He looks stiff as a mackerel to me.