Imagination is a killer.

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.

He was letting you break your icons one by one. he was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being.

I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.

[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.

All the stuff about being a drinking club, or having players who were not good enough, I treat as rubbish.

The essence of good and evil is a certain disposition of the will.

What you focus on grows.

Cultivate your sense of humour. On life's journey from nappy rash to denture adhesive, humour is a great pain reliever.

The other thing is even the Jews in the course - even though metaphorically aligning themselves with Indians, and, you know, you have genocide aligning itself with another genocide.

The thing about faith is that you have to have it before you need it.

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.