Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.

With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.

They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.

Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?

It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid.

It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

Reputation is an invisible force that works for or against you based on the efforts you put to persevere building your character

When I was a seminarian, I was dazzled by a girl I met at an uncle's wedding. I was surprised by her beauty, her intellectual brilliance... and, well, I was bowled over for quite a while.

I've been dealing with politicians all my life. They are all talk, no action.

People who are fully alive look out of their minds to those who simply exist.

Sometimes arrogance makes us overreach. George Bush Jr. often tries to suggest the leaders of other countries, and it is just not good diplomacy.

To like things like, whatever one may ail; There is certain help.

Existence is not a mystery unless you think it has a meaning.

Beauty is the mind, heart and balls of the person seeking to be beautiful.

The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.