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.

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

Happiness is the maximum agreement of reality and desire.

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

The most beautiful women in the world were African.

Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history.