Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

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.

In the furnace of fire, gold and silver are refined.

That's it. New rule: no more flirting during the zombie apocalypse

History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.

A kid in an abusive home has far fewer rights than any POW. There is no Geneva Convention for kids.

In order for poetry to exist there has to be not-poetry to contrast it with.

In Angels in America, I got to fulfill a lifelong dream. I was in the air eight nights a week for two years, and I just loved it.

It would make life much easier if I could have total faith and not question everything all the time, but I can't do it and I won't do it.

The odds against an adoptee ending up as the child of the President of the United States are staggering. But then, so are the odds against a movie star becoming president

I'm not a T.G.I.F. guy. I get off a plane at 2 o'clock in the morning and I'm looking for my secretary because I want to know what's going on.

Revolution Is the affair of logical lunatics.