On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.

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.

I wonder, ” he said, “whether the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again...

Danny: You can be as morally righteous as you want—in a vacuum—but throw in a second entity and you gotta start acting in response to the other.

The victorious Christian neither exalts nor downgrades himself. His interests have shifted from self to Christ.

The idea that you can't lose contact with the leaders has cut more throats than it has saved.

I suppose that the media and their portrayal of Islam and the almost tribal separations and divisions of the Muslims are the greatest issues confronting Muslims in the United Kingdom.

The way to feel better about your own situation is to improve someone else’s circumstances.

The most important civil liberty... is to stay alive and to be free from violence and death.

I enjoy learning technical details.

The various religions are like different roads converging on the same point. What difference does it make if we follow different routes, provided we arrive at the same destination?

I still have highs and lows, just like any other person. What's missing is the lack of control over the super highs, which became destructive, and the super lows, which are immediately destructive.