A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.

It takes courage to know when you ought to be afraid.

I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

In six pages, I can't even say "Hello.

I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like MIT to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all of my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him.

It is difficult to be king when the gods are changing.

a soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.