What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world.

During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.

What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren't well connected.

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

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

You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.