Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this

Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.

Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.

A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren't always clear to him. It's often a matter of intuition.

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.