Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real.

But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.

Poe was the first writer to write about main characters who were bad guys or who were mad guys, and those are some of my favorite stories.

Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.

...they came to see what happened to their town, to see if it was indeed lying burnt and bleeding. Many of them also came to die.

What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did? There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, but because you think I should be. I look back on the way I was. A young, stupid kid that committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him. Tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone, and this old man is all that's left.

I looked at the ceiling and wished this life was over. This unhappy life that had started out so confidently. I thought I would sleep no more that night but eventually I did. In the end we always wear out our worries. That's what Wire man says.