Friendship, like credit, is highest when it is not used.

A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.

Status in itself is criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

In the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without.

Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

I have drawn inspiration from the Marine Corps, the Jewish struggle in Palestine and Israel, and the Irish.

One doesn’t have a sense of humor. It has you.

Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.

When I’m asked who my audience is, I say someone with an open mind, which is not a vacant one and sometimes a liberal mind is not the same thing as an open one.

Those men are most apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad, who are under the discipline of shrews at home.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there’s often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

Bolshevism presented itself as an economic threat to themselves at the same time that Nazism presented itself as a political threat to their countries.

When a singer leaves a band, I believe the band loses something creatively and the fans are disappointed too.

I was on a train of lies. I couldn’t jump off.

I start to feel like I can’t maintain the facade any longer, that I may just start to show through. And I wish I knew what was wrong. Maybe something about how stupid my whole...

They were nothing like the French people I had imagined. If anything, they were too kind, too generous and too knowledgable in the fields of plumbing and electricity.

A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman as bad as she dares.

Responsibility is the price of freedom.

Decisions in most of LOST’s agencies – and especially its Tribunal – will be made on the basis of majority rule. Each country will have one vote.

The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.

My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences; just the same, you need to understand that many of...

From the time that he had first found, himself alone with them, Oliver had felt sure that the animals could come alive again if they wished.

Usually a good part of the people trying it end up not making it.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

I mean, I don’t want to sound – of course it’s very nice, people come up and say appreciative things about my work. But the loss, in terms of privacy and anonymity, is no small...

Marriage is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of three.

Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within...

I always told my dad I’d play professional football.

I’ve spent my life supporting myself.

On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the...

Marriage is socialism among two people.

I was always looking to record, but how much I actually pursued it was another thing. The major labels weren’t that interested in me, and the smaller labels didn’t have any money to do anything.

Sometimes I wish that there were a way to let people know that just because I live in a world without rules, and in a life that is lawless, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt...

The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition and incompetence.

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people’s recollections, which change with time.

Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic.

If you don’t listen, you’re never gonna learn.

I was wholeheartedly attracted to the conservative atmosphere that permeated the city of Washington.

They talk themselves out of everything else, there’s nothing else but you and the information you want, and they give it to you.

This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough.

You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It’s invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.

Jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

So far, at least, I haven’t found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind.

A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein but with the attention span of Daffy Duck.

Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that.

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect.

When goods are exchanged between countries, they must be paid for by commodities or gold. They cannot be paid for by the notes, certificates, and checks of the purchaser’s country, since these are of value...

It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one’s mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.