The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

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.

Getting employment is equivalent to cutting your life into pieces bit by bit

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

My first language is both English and Spanish. My mom was raised in Los Angeles, so with her we spoke English, but my father was born in Cuba, so with him we spoke Spanish.

Screenplays are the hardest thing to try to get right. They look so simple when they work, but they really destroy your brain cells trying to get them there.

I found myself getting more publicly shy when the gala events and big crowds started. Some people embrace it. To me, it's not worth enough to risk my private life being public.

The Koran and the laws of all civilized nations legislate against the vilification of religions.

Although I am a woman and young, I have more than enough courage to suffer this death and a thousand more.

We’ll never be over, Eva.

It's good to remember where you've been.

All beauteous things for which we live By laws of space and time decay. But Oh, the very reason why I clasp them, is because they die.