I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.

What can any one person do?' he said. 'Each person does a little something,' I said, 'and there you are.

We'd all do well to start over again, preferably with kindergarten.

He became fubar in the classic way, which is to say that he was the victim of a temporary arrangement that became permanent.

Much of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war, which as we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse than that — romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again.

I think... it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call 'personality,' or maybe even 'pain.'

There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.