Lee Harvey Oswald was boiling over about everything: the American ambassador; the Russians-he was mad at them because they wouldn't let him stay in Moscow. We talked to him for about half an hour, and my Italian friend didn't think the guy was worth filing a story about. Just another paranoid hysteric; the Moscow woods were rampant with those. I never thought about him again, not until many years later. Not until after the assassina­tion when I saw his picture flashed on television.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.

Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.

Every day is a new day with me. All holds are off. All contracts are forgotten.

If a man doesn't like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn't like either of them, well, I'm in trouble anyway: he don't like girls.

It's odd about tattoos. I've talked to several hundred men convicted of homicide-multiple homicide, in most cases. The only common denominate- I could find among them was tattoos. A good eighty percent of them were heavily tattooed.