The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

History is where tensions were.

Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.

When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.

We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.