It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

Somebody realized, hey, students are printing dummy ads and dummy news stories, why don't they really print something. So there was the Shortridge Daily Echo, and a hell of a lot of writers have come out of Shortridge on that account. The head writer of the I Love Lucy show, Madelyn Pugh, was a schoolmate of mine. Dan Wakefield. Writing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.

Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.

See the cat? See the cradle?