It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

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.

There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things

Art has to maintain as large a space for interpretation as possible, and to protect itself from being too narrow.

We might die from medication but we sure killed all the pain

Let probability and sample size do the heavy lifting.

As long as I can sing halfway decent, I'd rather sing than act. There's nothing like being in good voice, feeling good, having good numbers to do and having a fine orchestra.

The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own] government statements.

War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.

You're the father of the person who is my life.

Happy is the man who can endure the highest and lowest fortune. He who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity has deprived misfortune of its power.