That night the mosquitoes ate us up. I had bites all over my body. Back home I thought mosquitoes never bit black people. Not as much as they bit white people, anyway. Maybe Vietnamese mosquitoes just...
I was teased if I brought my books home. I would take a paper bag to the library and put the books in the bag and bring them home. Not that I was that concerned about them teasing me - because I would...
You are not in Disneyland, he said. The little people you see running around over here are not Mouseketeers. Some of them are friendly, and some of them have a strong desire to kill you. If you rememb...
I've always found old bookstores exciting. Whenever I'm in a city that's new to me, I immedicately look through the telephone directory for BOOKS, USED AND RARE. Book dealers send me their catalogs, a...
Reading is not optional.
...when we feel powerless, we stop trying to find a better way.
My younger brother's death in Vietnam was both sobering and cause for reflection. In 'Fallen Angels' I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic.
I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic...
All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.
I had seen the ballet of 'Swan Lake' as a child but it was as an adult, when I saw a production featuring Erik Bruhn, that I first noticed how significant a part the ever-present threat of violence pl...
One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The milit...
Let me thinkThinking is all I haveIf wisdom is a pretenseThen let me pretend to be wise
Children have adopted a consumerist attitude - I dare you to entertain me.
People who want to hate you can find something in you they don't like. They have a talent for doing that.
When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy... you can bet he's worried either about his story or his ability to tell it.
First, people tolerate evil because they see some benefit to themselves,' he said. 'Then, they feed it in hope that it will turn into something else. Then, they appease it in hope that it will not tur...
What did I do? I walked into a drugstore to look for some mints, and then I walked out. What was wrong with that? I didn't kill Mr. Nesbitt.
Fools commit suicide and think they're doing themselves a favor.
There were two very distinct voices going on in my head and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life and establishing myself as a male... The other voice, the one I had from...
Sometimes everybody touches in the dark. You touch to see what you can stand to touch, what you can to feel with your fingers probing parts you never though you could probably probe - Gray