...precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.

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.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Dogs speak words, but only poets and children Hear.

How much time? Not as much as I had yesterday.

Learn and train yourself to take the hits in life. Obstacles, barriers and setbacks will come. What matters is how you tackle them, work your way around or find your way through them.

Boundaries, and countries, if we don't have that we are all brothers and sisters, we can all have love and joy and compassion for each other: the world would be much more beautiful.

The only valid starting point is to understand what we all share - we have to find what we can all agree on.

For she had embodied the Great Perhaps--she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps.

Blood sweat and tears homie I'm made of it

[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

Don't start. My mood stays better if you don't start.