You become who you pretend to be.

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

My definition of a man's man is a man who knows gun safety, and we all did.

I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.

Terry Kitchen asked me one time why, since I had so few gifts as a husband and father, I had gotten married. And I heard myself say: "That's the way the post-war movie goes.

The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are.

And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.