Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and it's fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.