“Give people a break. It's not easy doing a life.”

“If you want to tell the truth, write fiction”

“learning texts is worth doing not because it's easy but because it's hard.”

“It was like that afore you got here, it's like that now, and it's going to be like that when you and me are gone, departed and left, and so there is only one rule, swing with it and smile.”

“[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"(One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.)”

“Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.”

“To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one's ability to learn something new that exceed the frameworks with which one enters.”