Happiness is a myth, Karla once said. It was invented to make us buy things.

Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, she said, it’s the other way around.

‘Do you remember what Karla said about secrets, when we were sitting here one night?’ ‘No, man. What was it?’ ‘It isn’t a secret, unless keeping it hurts.’

I’d been a man who committed crimes, up to then, rather than a criminal, and there’s a difference between the two. The difference, as with most things in life, lay in the motive and the means.

Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it’s worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end.

Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they’re not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve.

The only victory that really counts in prison, an old-timer in the Australian jail once said to me, is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It’s not just the body that must survive a jail term: the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living

Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.

They were poor, tired, worried men, but they were Indian, and any Indian man will tell you that although love might not have been invented in India, it was certainly perfected there.