"Trained combatants in Gujarat entered villages and attacked men, women and children. Pregnant women had their wombs ripped open and unborn babies were ripped out and tossed into burning fires. Approximately three hundred women were gang-raped. Over two thousand people died. I have photos too gruesome to show, in my office . . . Mr Speaker, our government must respond to these brutal attacks and the underlying extremism. The silence of the US Government is deafening."

"In 2004, he went on a fact-finding mission to India, and concluded that the laws preventing abusive conversion methods were undemocratic. He also attended the PIFRAS (Policy Institute for Religion and State) seminar on India that year, and is known for his pro-Pakistan stand. In 2001 he tried to set up a Kashmir Forum in the US Congress. In 2003 he inaugurated on Capitol Hill a pro-Pakistan conference on Kashmir. He is known to be a ‘long time sympathizer of the pro-Pakistani lobby’ and Indian officials boycotted his events. As a Christian conservative, he received a hundred percent rating for his voting record from the American Conservative Union in 2005 and the Christian Coalition in 2004. Pitts, along with the former US Senator Rick Santorum, helped sponsor a Religious Freedom Day in 2006 for DFN. Pitts is known for his support for US intervention in Iraq, and also tried to sneak Christian Intelligent Design theory into the national school curriculum. He is now a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he heads a new program called ‘America’s Enemies’, which will ‘focus on identifying, studying, and heightening awareness of the threats posed to America and the West from a growing array of anti-Western forces that are increasingly casting a shadow over our future and violating religious liberty around the world’."

"I think that Vietnam is what we had instead of happy childhoods."

"There was such a dense concentration of energy there [Vietnam], American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years."

"War stories aren't really anything more than stories about people anyway."

"Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there."

"Soldier: You guys aught to do a story on me suntahm. Herr: Why should we do a story about you? Soldier: 'Cause I'm so fuckin' good, 'n' that ain' no shit, neither. Got me one hunnert 'n' fifty-se'en gooks kilt. 'N' fifty caribou. Them're all certified."

"Mal Hombre: God damn it, Sergeant. I thought you were a professional soldier. Sergeant: I waited as long as I could, Sir. Any longer, and I was gonna lose my man. Mal Hombre: This outfit is perfectly capable of taking care of its own dirty laundry. Is that clear, Sergeant? Sergeant: Colonel, since when is a wounded trooper 'dirty laundry'?"

"Black sergeant: You a reporter? Herr: No, a writer. Black sergeant: Careful. You can't use no eraser up where you wanna go."

"Everybody wanted to be depressed. But your depression was supposed to be funny, too, and that was what had proved too much for Dolores."

"Dani said this woman, with whom she'd lived for two years, had never known her. "I feel like people accept the first thing I show them," she said, "and that's all I ever am to them.""

"Somebody once said to me if you want to be understood, don't write fiction."

"Of course there's something there; unfortunately, there's always something 'there.' Something you will one day be sorry you ever saw."

"She brightened. "Last week I ran a personal ad in the Guardian. I answered a few too. I'm not looking for sex; I feel too vulnerable for that. I just want somebody to hurt me and humiliate me.""

"My ambition was to live like music."