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.

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.

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.

But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, expect there's still this sound you can't hear.

He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words.

Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.

And my dad drilled it in my head, you know, 'If you want it bad enough, and you're willing to make the sacrifices, you can do it. But first you have to believe in yourself.

I don't think you can get any more working class than me. Everyone seems posh to me.

a person who was clever ought to be clever enough not to be unjust or deliberately unkind to anyone.

Sometimes you just have to get a shock to grow up and wake up, and I've had lots of shocks because it's as though I don't learn the lessons, so something new comes and hits me.

I don't think there's ever been a friendly divorce.

I think people are afraid to express their opinions half the time.

I want every version of a woman and a man to be possible. I want women and men to be able to be full-time parents or full-time working people or any combination of the two.

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.