Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

Movie acting, I later realized, reminds me of contract bridge. Each requires the same concentration, intense short-term memory, and obliviousness to everything else until the last trump is called - or whatever it is they do.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist - I’m a conspiracy analyst.

Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state.