In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

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 is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.

I am glad The Worst Journey is coming out in Penguins: after all it is largely about penguins.

The sixth Harry Potter film - I don't like my performance in that film at all.

We're attracted to bad guys, and we like to follow bad guys, because they do things that we want to do but just don't do, for whatever reasons.

The more you paint the more fluent you are with your brush.

Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal.

I just don't want you to feel uncomfortable about this," he says. Say: "Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough." Show him your bicep.

I'm not a comedian. I didn't study sketch comedy; my background isn't that.

I'm too busy putting my energies into my performance to be a diva.

If I don't have fun, it's my own damn fault.