There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.

They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property.

A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.

The people in flight from the terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.

Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

I do want to make it very convincing. And the best way to do that is to put most of it in dialogue.