No matter what...ball made my heart beat faster, made me want to jump up and down and be Superman. That's what life was about anyway, being Superman and living like life itself was important. Basketball made my life important.

Each generation seems to invent its own reasons for war.

I keep threatening to keep a formal journal, but whenever I start one it instantly becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Instead of a journal I manage to have dozens of notebooks with bits and pieces of stories, poems, and notes. Almost every thing I do has its beginning in a notebook of some sort, usually written on a bus or train.

I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.

We all think we're different, but when it comes around, we end up needing the same things. Somebody to love us. Somebody to respect us.

The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help.

Each time I think there is no place lower to go, I find that there is at least one place that will mess you up worse than you were.