“I once heard that the French don't prosecute people who commit crimes of passion twenty minutes after waking.”

“It's a good thing I'm not the president, because I would prosecute everybody who was involved in that torture, I would prosecute the people who did it, I would prosecute the people who ordered it and they would all go to jail! Because Torture is against the law!”

“A traitor commits his crime but once. The rest/is retribution.”

“If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.”

“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.”

“People who commit monstrous crimes are not necessarily monsters. If they were, things would be easy. But they aren't and it is one of the experiences of life.”