...doing the smoker's comedy act: he hunted automatically…

After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.

— Tom Stoppard

Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.

— Anna Akhmatova

“I had a dream about you. You had just died, and I was debating putting your body into either a coffin or a shoebox.…

— Jarod Kintz

Let's try and create scenes that are about something... About something deeper than this ashtray.

— Martin de Maat

“smarting and smoke was hanging thick in the air while the ashtray on Karras’s desk was mounded high with ashes and the twisted butts…

— William Peter Blatty

“Air was filtering out of my two collapsing lungs. Water rose, bubbling to enter, and I would have died of instantaneous pneumonia - something…

— Grace Paley

“If someone burns out your eye I will take your socket and use it for an ashtray.”

— Anne Sexton

“Me and Mama never did like the smell of cigarettes but after Daddy died, sometimes we would light one up and put it in…

— Sandi Morgan Denkers

“She’s finished her cigarette but hasn’t put it out properly, so it’s still smoking in the ashtray. I crush mine into it, grinding until…

— Mohsin Hamid

“She reached into an alabaster box and pulled out a violet cigarette that also exactly matched her eyes. Some people just don't know when…

— Gary K. Wolf

“Six pull-tabs lay in the ashtray like scales from a mermaid.”

— Haruki Murakami

“My mother, sitting at the kitchen table, the steam rising from her cup entwining with the smoke curling from her cigarette resting on an…

— Patti Smith

I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing.

— Damien Hirst

If we found an ashtray in the studio, we'd try to play it and find a part for it in a song.

— Dusty Hill

“in his hand the heavy, rectangular onyx ashtray that had been on the table. Was he out of his mind? He’d crack her skull…

— Anonymous