Never test another man by your own weakness.

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the treetops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?

I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence. What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream.

It was a dark story.

This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.

The only certainty is death.

It's impossible to be a good writer if you haven't lived badly. A past life of drinking heavily, fighting and whoring all help to ease those words onto the page.

War is legitimized state-sponsored terrorism in a grand scale.

Challenge yourself, jump off the deep end and learn to swim.

It is secular spiritual music, the gospel blues. It's music from the heart instead of the head.

When I got out of high school they retired my jersey, but it was for hygiene and sanitary reasons.

History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page.

If you try to delight the undelightable, you've made yourself miserable for no reason.

Believe me, it is actions that count.

I have never regretted my silence. As for my speech, I have regretted it over and over again.