The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.