This is what i find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

Because of the movies nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war.

Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.