Tom Cruise credited as playing...
Vincent
- Vincent: Look in the mirror. Paper towels, clean cab. Limo company some day. How much you got saved?
- Max: That ain't any of your business.
- Vincent: Someday? Someday my dream will come? One night you will wake up and discover it never happened. It's all turned around on you. It never will. Suddenly you are old. Didn't happen, and it never will, because you were never going to do it anyway. You'll push it into memory and then zone out in your barco lounger, being hypnotized by daytime TV for the rest of your life. Don't you talk to me about murder. All it ever took was a down payment on a Lincoln town car. That girl,you can't even call that girl. What the fuck are you still doing driving a cab?
- Vincent: Get with it. Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?
- Vincent: Max, six billion people on the planet, you're getting bent out of shape cause of one fat guy.
- Max: Well, who was he?
- Vincent: What do you care? Have you ever heard of Rwanda?
- Max: Yes, I know Rwanda.
- Vincent: Well, tens of thousands killed before sundown. Nobody's killed people that fast since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did you bat an eye, Max?
- Max: What?
- Vincent: Did you join Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Whales, Greenpeace, or something? No. I off one fat Angelino and you throw a hissy fit.
- Max: Man, I don't know any Rwandans.
- Vincent: You don't know the guy in the trunk, either.
- Vincent: Most people - same job, same gig, doing the same thing 10 years from now. Us, we don't know what we are doing 10 minutes from now.
- Vincent: They project onto you their flaws, what they don't like about themselves. I had a father like that.
- Max: Mothers are worse.
- Vincent: Wouldn't know. My mother died before I remember her.
- Max: What about your father?
- Vincent: Hated everything I did. Got drunk, beat me up. In and out of foster homes, that kinda thing.
- Max: And then?
- Vincent: I killed him. I was twelve.
- [pauses, then laughs]
- Vincent: I'm kidding. He died of liver disease.
- Max: Well, I'm sorry.
- Vincent: No, you're not.
- Max: You're full of shit.
- Vincent: I'm full of shit? You're a monument of it. You even bullshitted yourself, all I am is taking out the garbage, killing bad people.
- Max: Yeah, well that's what you said.
- Vincent: You believed me?
- Max: Then what'd they do?
- Vincent: How do I know, you know? They all got that 'witness for the prosecution' look to me. Probably some major federal indictment of somebody who majorly does not want to get indicted.
- Max: First time in L.A.?
- Vincent: No. Tell you the truth, whenever I'm here I can't wait to leave. It's too sprawled out, disconnected. You know? That's me. You like it?
- Max: It's my home.
- Vincent: 17 million people. This was a country, it'd be the fifth biggest economy in the world and nobody knows each other. I read about this guy, gets on the MTA here, dies.
- Max: Oh.
- Vincent: Six hours he's riding the subway before anybody notices his corpse doing laps around L.A., people on and off sitting next to him. Nobody notices.
- Vincent: Okay, look, here's the deal. Man, you were gonna drive me around tonight, never be the wiser, but El Gordo got in front of a window, did his high dive, we're into Plan B. Still breathing? Now we gotta make the best of it, improvise, adapt to the environment, Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it.
- Max: I Ching? What are you talking about, man? You threw a man out of a window.
- Vincent: I didn't throw him. He *fell*
- Max: Well what did he do to you?
- Vincent: What?
- Max: What did he do to *you*?
- Vincent: Nothing. I only met him tonight.
- Max: You just met him once and you killed him like that?
- Vincent: What? I should only kill people after I get to know them?
- [Max is on the radio dispatch with his boss, Lenny]
- Max: Yeah, Lenny, what's up? It's me.
- Lenny: Just got off the phone with the cops. Desk sergeant called to check if you brought the cab in?
- Max: Yeah, so?
- Lenny: So, aside from I hate talking to cops, they tell me you crashed the goddamn cab?
- Max: No, no, I got crashed into. I didn't...
- Lenny: Do I care what, where, why? You're paying.
- [Vincent is trying to think of what Max should say next]
- Vincent: [to Max] It was an accident. You're not liable.
- Max: It was an accident. I'm not liable.
- Lenny: Bullshit. I'm making you liable. It's coming out of your goddamn pocket.
- Vincent: [to Max] You tell him to stick this cab up his fat ass.
- Max: I can't do that, that's my boss.
- Vincent: So?
- Max: I need my job.
- Vincent: No, you don't.
- Vincent: Someday my dream will come. One night you'll wake up and you'll discover it never happened. It's all turned around on you and it never will. Suddenly you are old, didn't happened and it never will, 'cause you were never going to do it anyway.