It's the difference between watching a football game between two teams you don't care about, and watching a game where you have some kind of personal identity with one of the teams, if only a huge bet.

Crack is ruining the drug culture.

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

You almost have to be a rock star to generate the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone's imagination.

No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.