Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.

Before the word gay had really been invented, was there's no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters - based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions - would they make categories. Everybody's everything.

Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.

Since there is no system of public education, the great majority of my fellow citizens is frighteningly ignorant. They have no idea where Iraq is. They accept as the gospel whatever the government tells them. Good grief, any other normal country would have been against the Iraq war! But we live in an abnormal country, governed by experts in deceptive advertising.

"Terrorism" is a metaphor, it's an abstract noun. It's like having a war on dandruff. It's something from advertising, it's meaningless.

Come to me and show me a small cancer and I'll tell you you've got a small cancer that should be cut out. That's realism but in America it's called cynicism.