I had seen a dawn like this one only twice in my life: once in Vietnam, when a Bouncing Betty had risen from the earth on a night trail and twisted its tentacles of light around my thighs, and years e...
I could see the uncertainty, the fear about her job, her paycheck, her relationship with her boss, the prospect of offending people with power and authority over others, the dark figure sitting in the...
Hope was the light that allowed man to prevail in the worst of circumstances. But it also could become the narcotic of the self-deluded and the naive.
He had been humiliated and treated like the white trash he was. Under the bedsheet that hides the identity of every Ku Klux Klansman is a cretinous, vicious, and childlike human being whose last holdo...
Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.
Believe long ago had decided it was better to be first in Gaul rather than second in Rome.
Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it’s the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the p...
There may be room in government service for the altruist and the iconoclast, but I have yet to see one who was not treated as an oddity at best and at worst an object of suspicion and fear.
The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus’ gifts.
The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impen...
THE TAILINGS OF the monsoon season moved across the sun that evening, darkening and wetting the land and lighting the sky with electricity that quivered and disappeared between the buttes and the clou...
Pray that liars aren’t kept a long time in purgatory
Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is.
Jolie Blon, the most haunting and unforgettable lament I have ever heard.
It's a great burden, being one of the good guys.
In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes a...
If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?
I hit him so hard spittle and blood flew from his mouth onto a woman’s blouse four feet away. I drove my fist into his kidney, a blow that made his back arch as though his spine had been broken, then...
How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?