Quotes from Poe Ballantine

Most people would live in an outhouse in Bangladesh before they would voluntarily move to Nebraska.

I read to him from his mother's Bible the first line of Genesis: 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' It says nothing about hell, Tom. That came later with the membership drive.

The errors of the policeman were no greater or careless or more egregious than mine. It's just that my mistakes had comparatively little consequence.

Most people would live in an outhouse in Bangladesh before they would voluntarily move to Nebraska.

Zimmerman had seen so much blood, mayhem, and wretched sorrow in his day, and had liberated so many Hispanic ladies from their underwear, that it was clear to many that he was the only man for the job.

but happiness is like this, not handed out by the bucket from your television set but measured from a thimble by a stingy but wise old God and so we savored it

Why not relent, marry a reformed hooker, buy some old furniture and a ping-pong table, become a Cornhusker fan, open a dusty bottle of Kentucky straight, turn on the Rockies game, and enjoy the brief time you have left on this weird planet of sorrow?

We'd rather have satisfaction and the maximum titillation than real information, and so history, I insist to my good friend Steve Welch, isn't a cold sequential list of facts, it's a prize anthology of the best fiction.

A good American goes for it, just does it, slakes it, eats it, kills it, the more the better, damn the torpedoes!

Psychics are like porno stars," I said. "Anybody can be one.

One of my many weaknesses as a journalist is that I can't ask perfect strangers about the masturbation habits of their ex-spouses, just me being a stuffed shirt again.

Fate is often like a canoe after you've lost your paddles.

There's good money in true crime, I'm told, and plenty of it lying around, but it's a devil of an art form.

I have learned that I am not built for conflict or controversy. I have also learned that, in all my life, I have never chosen a story. The story has always chosen me.

Western Nebraska is the only place in all my travels where I have seen the dust blowing and the rain falling at the same time.

'Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere' took me six years to write.

I'm that sensitive, honest guy who likes people, wants to know why, and who puzzles everyone by continually putting himself in harm's way.

All my life, I never realized you could have a conversation with a ghost.

A bilingual marriage, by the way, is a great way to stay together for longer than you normally would because you can't understand each other very well.

Chadron had a water tower, grain elevators, a tanning salon, a video rental store, a small liberal arts college, a Hardee's, a stoplight, and a curling yellow sign in the pet store window that read, 'Hamsters and Tarantulas Featured Today.'

I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.

Because I've lived a risky and unconventional life, I don't often struggle for subjects to write about.

I first came across Chadron, Nebraska, by accident in 1994.

One evening, after my wife and son had gone out for a walk, I decided to have a talk with my neighbor, who I believe was murdered. I had gotten to know and admire him by listening to people talk about him. He seemed a wonderful person with much to give.