"Men, are you over 40? When you wake up in the morning, do you feel tired and rundown? Do you have that listless feeling..."

"Jefferies."

"Congratulations, Jeff!"

"For what?"

"For getting rid of that cast!"

"Who said I was getting rid of it?"

"This is Wednesday; seven weeks from the day you broke your leg. Yes or no?"

"Gunnison, how did you ever get to be such a big editor with such a small memory?"

"By thrift, industry, and hard work... and, uh, catching the publisher with his secretary. Did I get the wrong day?"

"No... no, wrong week. Next Wednesday I emerge from this plaster cocoon."

"I get myself half killed for you and you reward me by stealing my assignments."

"I didn't ask you to stand in the middle of that automobile racetrack."

"You asked for a, something dramatically different. You got it."

"So did you."

"Now wait a minute, Gunnison. You've got to get me out of here. Six weeks sitting in a two-room apartment with nothing to do but look out the window at the neighbors."

"Bye, Jeff."

"No, Gunnison... if you don't pull me out of this swamp of boredom, I'm gonna do something drastic."

"Like what?"

"Like what. I'm gonna get married. Then I'll never be able to go anywhere."

"It's about time you got married, before you turn into a lonesome and bitter old man."

"Yeah, can't you just see me, rushing home to a hot apartment to listen to the automatic laundry and the electric dishwasher and the garbage disposal and the nagging wife..."

"Jeff, wives don't nag anymore. They discuss."

"Oh, is that so, is that so? Well, maybe in the high-rent district they discuss. In my neighborhood they still nag."

"The New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the work house. They got no windows in the work house."

"You know, in the old days, they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker. Any of those bikini bombshells you're always watchin' worth a red-hot poker?"

"Oh dear, we've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes, sir. How's that for a bit of home-spun philosophy?"

"Reader's Digest, April 1939."

"Well, I only quote from the best."

"I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said. Nerves, I said. And I asked myself, 'What's General Motors got to be nervous about?' Overproduction, I says; collapse. When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country's ready to let go."

"In economics, a kidney ailment has nothing whatsoever to do with the stock market."

"You've got a hormone deficiency."

"How can you tell from a thermometer?"

"Those bathing beauties you've been watching haven't raised your temperature one degree in a month."

"I got a nose for trouble. I can smell it ten miles away... I can smell trouble right here in this apartment."

"I can see you in court now, surrounded by a bunch of lawyers in double-breasted suits. You're pleading: 'Judge, it was only a little bit of innocent fun. I love my neighbors like a father.' And the Judge says, 'Well, congratulations, you've just given birth to three years in...'"

"Yeah, right now I'd welcome trouble... You know, I think you're right. I think there is going to be trouble around here."

"What kind of trouble?"

"Lisa Fremont."

"Are you kidding? She's a beautiful young girl and you're a reasonably healthy young man."

"She expects me to marry her."

"That's normal."

"I don't want to."

"That's abnormal."

"I'm just not ready for marriage."

"Every man's ready for marriage when the right girl comes along. And Lisa Fremont is the right girl for any man with half a brain who can get one eye open."

"Oh, she's all right."

"She's too perfect. She's too talented, she's too beautiful, she's too sophisticated, she's too everything but what I want."

"Is, um, what you want something you can discuss?"

"She belongs to that rarified atmosphere of Park Avenue, you know. Expensive restaurants, literary cocktail parties... Can you imagine her tramping around the world with a camera bum who never has more than a week's salary in the bank? If she was only ordinary."

"I need a woman who's willing to go anywhere and do anything and love it."

"When a man and a woman see each other and like each other, they ought to come together - wham! Like a couple of taxis on Broadway, not sit around analyzing each other like two specimens in a bottle."

"Intelligence! Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence."

"Once it was see somebody, get excited, get married. Now it's read a lot of books, fence with a lot of four-syllable words, psychoanalyze each other until you can't tell the difference between a petting party and a civil service exam."

"When I married Miles, we were both a couple of maladjusted misfits. We are still maladjusted misfits, and we have loved every minute of it."

"Would you fix me a sandwich please?"

"Yes, I will. And I'll spread a little common sense on the bread. Lisa's loaded to her fingertips with love for you - I got two words of advice for you - Marry her!"

"Did she pay you much?"

"It's opening night of the last depressing week of L. B. Jefferies in a cast."

"I'm going to make this a week you'll never forget."

"Lisa. Carol. Fremont."

"Is this the Lisa Fremont who never wears the same dress twice?"

"Only because it's expected of her. It's right off the Paris plane. You think it will sell? A steal at $1,100."

"Eleven hundred? They ought to list that dress on the stock exchange."

"I'm in love with you. I don't care what you do for a living - I just want to be part of it somehow. It's deflating to find out that the only way I can do it is by taking out a subscription to your magazine."

"Someday you may want to open up a studio of your own here."

"How would I run it, from say, Pakistan?"

"Jeff, isn't it time you came home? You could pick your assignment."

"Make the one you want."

"You mean leave the magazine?"

"Yes."

"For what?"

"For yourself and me. I could get you a dozen assignments tomorrow - fashions, portraits. Well now, don't laugh, I could do it."

"That's what I'm afraid of. Can you see me driving down to the fashion salon in a jeep wearing combat boots and a three-day beard? Will that make a hit?"

"I could see you looking very handsome and successful in a dark blue flannel suit."

"Let's stop talking nonsense, shall we, hmm?"

"Miss Lonelyhearts. Well, at least that's something you'll never have to worry about."

"Oh? You can see my apartment from here, all the way up on 63rd Street?"

"No, not exactly... but we have a little apartment here that's probably about as popular as yours. You remember of course Miss Torso, the ballet dancer. She's like a Queen Bee with her pick of the drones."

"I'd say she's doing a woman's hardest job - Juggling Wolves."

"Why would a man leave his apartment three times on a rainy night with a suitcase and come back three times?"

"He likes the way his wife welcomes him home."

"What's he doing? Cleaning house?"

"He's washing and scrubbing down the bathroom walls."

"Must've splattered a lot."

"Come on, that's what we're all thinkin'. He killed her in there, now he has to clean up those stains before he leaves."

"Stella... your choice of words!"

"Nobody ever invented a polite word for a killin' yet."

"I just can't figure it. He went out several times last night in the rain carrying his sample case."

"Well, he's a salesman, isn't he?"

"Well, what would he be selling at three o'clock in the morning?"

"Flashlights. Luminous dials for watches. House numbers that light up."

"Those two yellow zinnias at the end, they're shorter now. Now since when do flowers grow shorter over the course of two weeks? Something's buried there."

"Mrs. Thorwald!"

"You haven't spent much time around cemeteries, have you? Mr. Thorwald could hardly bury his wife's body in a plot of ground about one foot square. Unless he put her in standing on end, in which case he wouldn't need the knives and saw."

"The last thing Mrs. Thorwald would leave behind would be her wedding ring. Stella, do you ever leave yours at home?"

"The only way somebody would get that would be to chop off my - finger. Let's go down to the garden and find out what's buried there."

"Why not? I always wanted to meet Mrs. Thorwald."

"What's a logical explanation for a woman taking a trip with no luggage?"

"That she didn't know she was going on a trip and where she was going she wouldn't need any luggage."

"Exactly."