Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.

Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.

You couldn’t live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.

Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war.

Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you’d seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.

A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet.

Kisses are a shared solitude.

I'm exhausted trying to stay healthy.

I have crushes on women all the time. I don't have intimate relationships with them, but I find women beautiful.

I have the backbone of an eel.

He knows himself, and all that's in him, who knows adversity.

If you have enough room for your books, you don't have enough books.

Geoff Muldaur was and is one of my musical heroes. When I listen to him sing and play, I can hear the coal mine, the cotton field, and last, but certainly foremost, the boy's boarding school.

New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light.

What does literature do for me? I think I solve problems in my writing. They may be my problems, but perhaps others share them, and in the process of working these through, I hope to entertain.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.