At least I hope - that the fiction I've written so far has flaws but has mostly been successful.

Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.

Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?

Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.

Just for the hell of it, try to love someone as unlike you as possible.

When I go train hopping and I look up into the sky, there are always so many more stars than I remember there were.

Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living.

The instant people specialize, its in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon.

[Ernest ]Hemingway always said, "Write about what you know." I think you can do that, and if you want to write about what you don't know, you can. It just takes a lot more work.

I feel like I'm almost ready to write fiction about the border. But even after 10 years of writing nonfiction about it, I don't think I know quite enough to do it right.

There will come a time when nobody reads my books and no one remembers who I was. And in the meantime, I'll do it my way.

Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.

You can forget me now because I was never welcome.

There was just something about a Delta boy. Physically, they were as good as men came. But add the whole warrior, protector, save-the-world attitude. Yeah, it worked for her.

One father is more than 100 schoolmasters.

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism the way you play it is free will.

With the death of bin Laden, it's finally time for Congress to bring back the pre-9-11 legal norm, before we decided it was okay to toss out our civil liberties if the 'bad guys' were scary enough.

I’m in love with everyone I’ve ever met in one way or another. I’m just a crazy, unhinged disaster of a human being.

Judge for yourself who's still fighting for change and who got sick on power, because the person in the Miraflores has forgotten about the people of Venezuela.

The list of problems that we all experience may be endless, but I honestly cannot abide by the rule that, 'He who yells louder is heard.'

If I can't get people to commit themselves on whether or not there is a square root of two, then I won't touch on God or anything here