Leo Crowley, Harry [Truman]'s Foreign Economic Administrator, tells Congressmen the theory...: 'If you create good governments in foreign countries, automatically you will have better markets for ourselves.' With that honeycunt staring you in the face, you'd forget your grammar too.

We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.

I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.

Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.