I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is the higher achievement.

Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.

The real unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, without anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present - they are real.

I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.

For a while, I thought I was going mad. At last, I became reconciled to my despair. The medications helped, too, I thought, sir.

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one. The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted - but rather, vastly enriched.

I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.