You become who you pretend to be.

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.

Hardly anyone in the world is an American

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.

What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.

The Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they'd send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they'd run our stories. So that's what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time.