To capture the human cost of fallen empire with all its horror and absurdity, Sheets offers the right combination: the political insight of a top reporter and the power of a novelist.

You have to be an outsider to write.

Happiness is the maximum agreement of reality and desire.

As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

Mystery books. I must read a hundred a year. . . I just wish some of them were harder to figure out.

I used to be treated like an idiot, now I'm treated like an idiot savant.

Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man.