I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.

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.

The future is greatly different than your life now, the actions that you take must also be greatly different. You cannot do the same thing and get something different.

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.

It's a grand thing to be able to take your money in your hand and to think no more of it when it slips away from you than you would a trout that would slip back into the stream.

People have to know that they can count on you, that you won't say one thing one day and something totally different the next.

It would be much easier to just make black, brown and beige clothes. But I do not see the world in black and white and beige. I find colors incredibly important.

The federal government is acknowledged by all to be one of enumerated powers. The principle, that it can exercise only the powers granted to it . . . is now universally admitted.

Sign by elevator put up by computer geeks in office building: REMEMBER: FIRST YOU PILAGE, THEN YOU BURN. THOSE WHO DO NOT COMPLY WILL BE SUSPENDED FROM THE RAIDING TEAM. In Mr Perfect

Luckily almost no one buys music anymore, so selling music doesn't really affect any of my professional decisions.

I feel that I've had a happy life, not a very useful life, but a happy one.

My favorite three words in the English language are: ’I don’t know’, because every time I say them, I learn something new.