Soldiers live. He dies and not you, and you feel guilty, because you’re glad he died, and not you. Soldiers live, and wonder why.
Write. Don’t talk about writing. Don’t tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don’t give me a bunch of “somedays.” Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all, it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English.
I’m an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.
My favorite sport is female and my favorite food is beer.
Oh, ’twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey.
A world ought to have a few genuine good guys, and not just a spectrum of people running from bad to worse.
Books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.
Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.
Time will unfold its leaves.
I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another.
Consistency is the sign of a narrow mind.
Religion is something that gets hammered in early, and never really goes away. And has powers to move which go beyond anything rational.
There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.
The only characters I’ve made to resemble real people have been grotesques.
Even when we know things, sometimes it takes words to make them concrete.
I guess I suffer from an impoverishment of the sociopathic spirit necessary to go big time.
More evil gets done in the name of righteousness than any other way.
Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.
There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.
I’m a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.