When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

I don't trust compliments. I've been getting them for years. Sometimes I deserve them, sometimes I didn't. But generally when people give you compliments there's one of two things wrong with them. Either they're false, or what's worse is they're sincere. They really mean the compliment. And then they're offering you their loyalty. And I'm kind of a stingy... Well, I don't necessarily want to give all that loyalty back. So either way, let's skip the compliments.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.