Miles, The Autobiography

Then we got into this discussion, Max and Mingus and me, about animals. This was after Mingus had talked about white people like they was nothing but beasts. Then, Mingus wants to talk about real live animals, so he says, "If you were to see an animal and you're driving your new car and the animal is in the street, would you swerve to keep from hitting him and crash your car, or would you try to stop or would you just hit it? What would you do?
Max says, "Well, I'd hit the motherfucker, because what should I do, stop and get all fucked up if a car is behind me, get my new car all smashed up?"
Mingus told him, "See there, you got the same ideas that white people have, that's just how a white man thinks. He would hit the poor animal, too, wouldn't care if he killed him or not. Me? I would smash up my car before I would kill a little defenseless animal." So this is how this conversation went all the way to California.
(...)
Now, one day Max let Mingus use his car and Mingus knocked a wheel off the car. Guess how he wrecked it. He run into a fire hydrant trying not to hit a cat. Man, I liked to die laughing because that was the same shit we had been talking about out on the road. But Max was madder than a motherfucker, man, and so they got into it again.